Sandy
By James E. Simmons, East Sierra Branch
Underneath the floorboards of the Ellis duplex at 200 A
Was pure beach sand providing comfort while you lay
Gazing at the still life of the base through the mesh weirs
Separating tranquility from the NOTSo quiet mission of the rocketeers
Our town, our whole world, just now 15 years old
Often ribboned with trenches deep for adventures bold
Jigsawed along the street and through the yards
Pipeline projects always left the best dirt clods
The double-hung wooden window frames
Of every home along Knox Road
Were packed and filled with dirt
Blown in from Mojave
The entire wall from the front to the back
In the cooler room for Rodman 60 A and B
Was just sand held in a matrix of glue
You could etch your name or something bad
A desert trail curved toward the BHS access gate
Twas later a Capehart road
Look away and look again
Tis the same once again today
The rare but certain drainage
Left the Rowe Street tree ditch
It ran east to a low spot and baked
It was a secret called Potato Chip Lake
The white path ran from top to bottom
Along the north edge of Lone Butte
You could run if you dared
But not if you really cared
The playgrounds at St. Ann’s were large
But left entirely dirt
Just one kickball for all eight grades
The impact really hurt
The unified Sierra Sands
No longer requires skirts for girls
Cuz many remember the cruel winds
Pinged painful rocks above the socks
That awful cloud southbound from Owens
Beneath the high Sierras
Was not the sweeping desert sands
But instead, lakebed dirt we called OVD
Our IWV soil, Drummond said, had too much arsenic
So, kids “don’t go barefoot”
Yeah, but it smelled so good
I ate of it a lot
And aside from being a little sandy
There’s nothing wrong with me….
Jim Simmons wrote this poem about growing up
on the Navy’s China Lake base,
for the new edition of Planet Mojave, East Sierra’s anthology.
© 2024 James E. Simmons