Plunked into a valley of dust and wrapped by fields of rice, Willows is just three square miles, a gas-and-rest stop for travelers passing through Northern California. To me, it’s home.
Each summer when I’m back from college, I slide into the driver’s seat and begin my daily circuit around town, daring the evening’s eclipse. Covering the town by car—up Highway 99, left on County Rd. 48 and then left on Roads D and 57—takess a mere 10 minutes.
Buckle up, let’s go.
Windows down, the dry heat pats my lashes and lifts the thin, stubborn cowlicks I’ve carried all 21years of my life. I take my shirt off; my right hand turns the volume all the way up, my left a snake flailing in the hot wind. If you time it just right, on Rd. D—once you pass the high school principal’s tucked-away house, the orchards that surround it, and tracks of trains that don’t run anymore—you’ll catch the main event, just west over your shoulder. The sun sets over friendly hills and protective mountains, many seeming close yet miles away. Willows: our roots, our town, named after trees that bend but don’t break.
Six minutes into the drive, Ethel Cain’s “Nettles” peaks with the middle console Zyn I bottom-lip tucked minutes earlier—my dad’s or mine, I’m never sure. It’s a light euphoria, and for a moment I’m free to float here in my brainless breeze. Turning left onto Rd. 57, I fix my eyes to the freeway overpass, slowly coming back down to earth like the dragonflies beside the marsh, flutters of nicotine and sunset now fading into the rearview. Many have a therapist for their feelings, but out here I get the solitude and space to reflect. I smile with nostalgia, for this is the same portrait, the same roads, sky, people, things, critters I’ve loved all my life.
On the flip side, when I’m alone on these roads, the weight of them settles in and the stillness turns solemn. Driving up the overpass, I catch a glimpse of the semicolon on my wrist—an aftertaste of my uncle Cesar’s sudden suicide—and feel my throat get tight. If I go further out of town on Road 60, I pass the spot where Mr. Licea, once a neighbor whose son is my younger brother’s good friend, was shot and killed in his truck. Stopping at the end of the road, I spot the culvert where Fabian Gutierrez was recovered after his car overturned. He was a young barista at the local Starbucks and a football player for the Willows Honkers, likely on a night drive like mine, when a failed turn went tragically wrong.
In town, you look away and wave to the passerby. Out here, on these roads, it finds you: you cannot hide—you can only drive through it all. Stained on asphalt, apart in gravel, thrown under the divider, a pileup blaze—those paralyzing and unrecognizable deaths. People, then bodies; there, then not; hit, gone. We were just with him…I was scared you might be in the car…I was supposed to be…
A suicide. A fit of rage. A drunken crash—the ones I’ll never understand how or why but have a certificate for explaining what.
Other deaths become buried in communal memory, not receiving proper memoriam, because not all died here at home. Those brothers missing on the lake. The girl left in a bag. The boy killed by his older boyfriend in New York. My cousin who fell sick and died out of the blue.
When lives like these are cut short, people say, “That family will never be the same,” but truth be told, none of us will.
Confused and angry, we channel our sorrow into community. Vigils set in parkyard grass draw out a wordless mass, a Jeep brigade on funeral day carrying people and folktales from every class. Meal trains, GoFundMes, and community-wide FaceBook eulogies arrive, untimed,
for the bereaved. Hugs, kisses, and tears mend old wounds between friends whose better days trail behind them on their beloved’s memorial display. Painted murals, sprayed initials, and familiar stickers on rearview windshields mark people—legacies that need remembering, stories worth telling and retelling.
In fields past the tracks, by ditches and shacks—here lie the sites of slow, shallow breaths. Roadside memorials mark these deaths, honoring lives well-lived, adorned with two-by-four
crosses, time-honored trinkets, and team flags faded beneath country dust and summer spray. Somewhere, inscribed on wood, are names and titles: mother, husband, daughter, friend, proud Willows High Honker. Names that held the same textbooks, shared the same teachers, shopped at the same two supermarkets, ran the same red lights, and breathed the same wildfire smoke as I.
On the hottest summer days we used to drive to an irrigation ditch known as “The Swirls” like our siblings and parents did before us. A rite of passage, high-schoolers park their trucks backward facing water, jumping off tailgates into whirlpools that, if you can’t beat the tide, take you to a low-head dam. I never jumped in, in part because of my poor swimming ability, but mainly because we’d all heard the same story about the girl that drowned here trying to reach her friends on the mound.
Why we jumped in waters called “swirls,” with toxins and rebar, why it was done drunk or high, why we kicked up dust on the way out with people in the back—I don’t know. It was tradition, living precariously with death in mind, never expecting it to bite.
Small-town tragedy is not small for a town that’s always dying—slowly, surely, sometimes
tragically and abruptly—where death often becomes larger than life itself.
Willows is a town whose resolve comes not from the greater powers wrapping it in the valley of
Northern California but from each other. Around us are forces that pay us no mind—the millions of passersby on Interstate-5 connecting Canada to Mexico, the monumental mountains and Pacific Ocean to the west, the urban elites east, and the alienating State Capitol south. It’s these forces that remind us of our seeming inconsequence, that reinforce our togetherness in our small, easily forgotten town.
Without each other, our grief is a tsunami, us a blip in the wind.
In the middle of nowhere, we get to live somewhere inexplicably special. Together bound, we move with the wind like the willows by the canal, held by the same roots. While you can be anywhere in the world but here, far and away, close and near, dead or alive, Willows will always be a part of us, a town that never dies.
I breathe deeper, think fuller, and love harder because I grew up in a town full of weeping
Willows. People that, aware of our simple but significant existence, taught me to accept and trust
in spite of differences. I was raised not to fly in a flock but to fly as a flock, our direction shaped by one another rather than a horizon set before us. The town I love is no stranger to heartache, and its people bear grit, resilience, love, and grace as a result.
The roadside memorials—both alive and seared in folktale memory—reveal themselves in
golden hour, reminding me my solo drives, between the crickets’ song and the rooster’s morning crow, are never truly alone.
On the outskirts of town, out for fresh air, it becomes clear: there’s no breathing without inhaling the overgrown grief around you.[When I feel it settling, I hold tighter to the legacies of those who deserved longer. I ask my mom and my nana for stories, to see the shape of the loss that hangs over our dust-filled valley. I answer grief with remembrance. Some got a newspaper clipping, some a quick local news segment, some nothing at all. Their lives keep living in the people and places still here.
Slowing into town, I’ll pass the saloon still out of business, a recently opened bar down the road, and into the heart of downtown home to my aunt’s salon and a newer cafe called Carte Blanche. I’ll see faded paint on the once-abandoned movie theater turned church and fresh purple and gold passing the High School, and oh, a new park right in front of it. Making my left to go home I’ll hit Sycamore Park, where a school once stood and where my dog Rue now runs, with candles and pictures where kids skate honoring Weston Strout, a 16-year-old boy who died by suicide during my first week of college. I may pass Pastor Huffman, whose wife is now gone but whose smile is hard to shake, and wave to elementary-school teachers that taught me or my mom like Mrs. Dunning or Mr. T. Pulling into my driveway I’ll wave to Tuffy our next-door-neighbor and then Jim, who’s across the street, his white-lab hobbling a little more than the last time home.
My night drive fills me with urgency to show up for the people that have done so much for me: deliver the letter to my first-grade teacher, Mr. Dennis; watch the news with my grandparents; say what’s up to my former coworkers at Dutch Bros; text my best friend, Meggie. Willows is not glitzy or glamorous, nor precious all the time, but for all its losses it remains the shiniest part of my life. In the face of grief, I’m moved to do the small things—checking in, being present, and doing more for the people I care about both at home and at school—the quiet work of a weeping willow.
