My father, Coleman Park Colla, died a few weeks ago, and I miss him dearly. This is what I said at his funeral:
My father taught me a some important things in life, including some salty nursery rhymes about milk and lemonade, and how to parallel park. Let me tell you about two things in particular I learned from him.
Reading. It was 1970 or so, a time of war, as now. I was four or five years old. The house I grew up in was located in the “A Streets” of the tract home development called Eastbluff, located just off Jamboree Boulevard, on the inland edges of the white enclave of Newport Beach. Our neighborhood had been formed by bulldozing a hill that was, at that time, mostly surrounded by the Irvine Ranch. Buffalo and long-horn cattle roamed the hills around us, and you could sometimes smell the perfume of orange orchards when the winds turned offshore.
No one who lived in Eastbluff was from Eastbluff. And it would take many years for the pepper trees and eucalyptus to replace the live oak forests that had been scraped down to make way for our ranch-style model homes. It was a transient, shadeless place, but it was also home.
My father got up early and each day, and he read the paper for 30 minutes or so before going to work. The Los Angeles Times. I also got up early those days because I was one of those kinds of kids. It was often pitch dark as he sat down at the kitchen table. I sat next to him as he drank percolated coffee, ate toast, and read the newspaper.
For me, the newspaper was a magical thing: it arrived somehow each and every morning and by the time you woke up, it was there, waiting for you. Later, I would learn exactly how papers were delivered: that was my first job at the age of nine.
My father would spread the paper out on the table, and inspect the sections in order of seriousness: there was the Front Page, the Opinion Section, the Orange County section. There was The Sports Section, The Business Section, The Classified Section. He was an active reader who might scoff or laugh or shake his head at what they printed. Sometimes he would save important articles to read later in the day, after he got home from work.
But this is the important thing I want to tell you about: from early on, he would take out The Comics Pages, and fold them for me to look at. There were two whole pages of cartoons to gawk at, and I remember gazing at them each day long before I knew my alphabet. If something looked interesting, I’d ask my father to read it to me, and he would point to the letters and sound them out. I would repeat them, looking at the groups of letters over and over again, trying to figure which sounds went with which signs. Gradually, I began to see the words for what they were, and at some point, I was reading.
I now knew that the paper’s arrival meant a new cartoon wonderland every day. Tumbleweeds. Broom Hilda. B.C. Andy Capp. Beatle Bailey. Blondie. The Better Half. Peanuts. Dennis the Menace. Family Circus. Grin and Bear It. There was something utterly baffling called Apartment 3-G and another called Rex Morgan. There was an outrageous cartoon that would often trigger my father, and he would scoff and snort. Once again, that bleeding heart liberal Gary Trudeau had gone too far.
Growing up, I assumed that every serious man read the paper every morning, and I set out to emulate him. Eventually, I began to read the serious sections too, just like my father did. I read about Watergate and the evacuation of Saigon and Hank Aaron and Bubbles the Hippo and Gaylord Perry. I read about another outrageous liberal—a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia.
That’s how I learned to read, next to my father, at the breakfast table. It began with everyday newspaper reading, and moved on to magazines and books, then computer screens and smartphones. We still get the paper paper delivered to our home. And I scoff and snort at the kind of stuff they print in those pages, just like my father used to do.
The second thing I learned from him was how to walk outdoors. When I was young, our family did not take vacations. Instead, we packed up the station wagon and headed to the beach or the mountains for camping trips.
When your father has a name like my father’s, there is something mysteriously dad about camping. We slept in a Coleman tent. We cooked on a Coleman stove. We put our food in a Coleman ice box. Not only was my father’s name written on all our camping gear, but it was written on everyone else’s camping gear too. When we camped, we seemed to camp in Colemanland. As a Coleman son, this fact was a source of pride for me, and part of why camping felt like belonging.
One of our favorite destinations was Mineral King, an alpine valley in the Southern Sierra Nevadas. It used to be home to the southern-most glacier in North America until that landmark disappeared. Our days there did not start with a newspaper, but with a ritual bath in the Kaweah river. My brother Phil and I knew how frigid the icy waters were. Our father would march us through the forest, and Phil and I would cry and sob, dreading what was about to happen. Our father was undeterred by our tears. There was no way around it: we had to bathe each and every day. He’d make us strip off our clothes and go in. We didn’t have to stay in the water for very long, but we did have to go in at least twice: once to get completely wet and once again to rinse off the soap. My brother and I learned how to do this in less than a minute, and I remember us bundling up in towels afterwards, too shocked and outraged to speak about what just happened. Meanwhile, there was our father, standing out in the middle of that roaring river in his bun-huggers, hooting and hollering like a madman. Unlike us, he loved his arctic baths—for him, they were invigorating.
During these trips, we’d take strenuous hikes each day. We’d follow the hiking path up toward the great meadow, passing through massive aspen forests that shimmered green and silver in the morning breezes. We’d walk across massive slides of granite scree, while marmots peeped at us from behind rock piles. Sometimes, we’d take fishing poles and spend the day fishing for brook trout in the creeks further up the meadow. My mother taught us how to identify the small white ‘latrine flower,’ and encouraged us to aim for them when we had to go. My sister Ashley would pick small bouquets of other wildflowers and would later stick them into an empty bottle of Gallo wine on the picnic table at the campsite. We’d walk and we’d walk, then have a picnic, and walk some more. What I’m trying to say is here, in this magical place, I learned to love hiking, since it meant hiking for hours with my father who loved hiking, and then returning home to our campsite where his name was the headliner.
I want to end with a picture of my father in the upper alpine meadow of Mineral King. It was a very special place to my father, and we spoke about it more than once these past months as his health faded.
If you follow the Kaweah river up to Monarch Creek, then along Eagle Creek through the marshy lower meadow, you eventually get to a thicket of pine where there are stables for the mule teams that used to service the backcountry miners. Continuing up the meadow, you walk along Crystal Creek, then Franklin Creek. The creeks get smaller and smaller, and the soil gets drier and rockier, and eventually you arrive at the line where the trees finally end.
Here, there is hill covered with stones and stunted conifers and patches of wildflowers. It sits under granite peaks that are covered in snow, even in July. On that hillside is a magical thing—a soda spring. The water there burbles out of the ground cold and bubbly. It’s just a trickle though, and the only way to get at the soda water is to dip your canteen or cup into a small trough someone dug from the red clay earth.
The first time we visited the spot, more than fifty years ago, I remember my dad sitting around the spring with other fathers. One of them had brought a flask of bourbon, and the dads were sipping bourbon and soda and laughing about how good life was. It was one for the books—magical bubbly water, and dads getting tipsy in the wilderness.
In August 2000, my father and I went back to Mineral King. After Visalia and Three Rivers, we got to the foothills, stopping briefly at the famous blackberry brambles to pick a bucket of juicy sweet fruit. Then we drove up the single-lane dirt road that zigzags up the mountain toward Sawtooth Peak. We arrived at the Cold Springs Campground, and pitched our tent in the same site we’d camped in decades earlier. And then, for the next days, we walked along the same trails we’d walked before. We climbed up to Mosquito Lake, and soaked our feet in its crystal clear, icy waters. We fished in Monarch Creek, though we didn’t catch anything. He took his ritual bath each day and hooted and hollered at how invigorating it was; I did not.
One day, we decided to walk all the way up to Farewell Gap—it was a long hike with many, many miles at high altitude. My father was only a few years older than I am now, but he loved to walk, and did many miles that day. On the way back, we came to that same hillside, and that same soda spring. I don’t know how long it took us to find it. It wasn’t easy. But eventually, we found it and sat down. We were exhausted and happy. There was no bourbon that day, but just a little Tang in a recycled sandwich bag. We dipped our Sierra cups into the red clay basin of bubbly water, and began to make backcountry orange soda.
I can see my father sitting there, sipping it like it was bourbon and soda, laughing with honest exhaustion and thinking about how good life is. Laughing and thinking about how good life is. That was also a lesson, and of course, a gift.
If I am as fortunate as my father, I will one day visit that place with my own daughter, Lina. And maybe it’ll take us a while to find that soda spring. And maybe we will find it and sit there, sipping bubbly water in honest exhaustion. And if we do, I am sure that we will remember my father, her Zayde, and we will laugh, and think about how good life is.