STILL EXPLORING THE IDEA OF HOME...

YUBA CITY, SUTTER COUNTY, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., WORLD

Margaret and I began the day with breakfast with Helen and Don... before driving past a young walnut orchard on the way to 533 Neal Drive, the first "home" we actually owned.  In 1964 I built the fence that still stands around this house during the time when I was a teacher and chairman of the English Department at Yuba City High School.

My own high school years were spent in Live Oak, a small town near the Sutter Buttes up the road from Yuba City.  The Buttes are known as the shortest range of mountains in the world.  The mountains began forming 1.6 million years ago when a volcano pushed up a basalt plug in the great inland sea that once covered what later became the Sacramento Valley.  The volcano cooled forming a single island in the middle of the sea. Over subsequent years the sea retreated out to the Pacific Ocean leaving the mountain in the middle of a valley.  Over many more years the mountain eroded down to the cluster of hills and small mountain peaks in Sutter County.

The first indigenous people to come to the valley probably showed up as early ten thousand years ago, perhaps even earlier.  The Maidu wandered around the valley to the east of the cluster of Buttes
and the Wintun lived between the Buttes and the Coast Range of mountains. I remember doing a research paper as an undergraduate and learning that the larger collection of tribes called themselves Histam Yanni. "Maidu" was the word for man.

The red-headed wood pecker gave me a bonus picture today.