Ninashka Hanz talks about being a good little witch. How Wicca is the only religion a woman like her could embrace; how her Solvak grandmother taught her the old ways and what was the point of life but to be one with nature and your own true self. How her Czech grandmother was a witch too, but deep and dark.
Twenty and wonderous, she moves from one campsite to the next, changing conversations, flipping the radio dial. She’s approached our site after a short exchange in laid back FM station style with Don the post office warehouse worker whose tent is nearest the forest. Then we watched her sashay up to AM Top 40 tuned Joe six-pack who camps with a family not his own, having exchanged his kids for someone else’s when a new Momma came into his life. I thought I’d seen her before.
Nina says the big Rec-V next to ours belongs to an ex-Navy guy who was at Ft. Meyers back in the late sixties and now drives around the lower 48 from state park to federal forest, camping out year round. “I tried to sell him on driving up to Alaska,” Nina said, “but he didn’t want to drive outside the borders of the USA. Go figure.”
We’d seen her hitching on Rt. 101, out fetching groceries, we found out later. I spotted her first, warned Hank to slow down. “It’s a girl, Hank. We have to pick her up.” He shrugged, drove past. “We’re headed to Mono, have to get there by dark.” By now he realized I was bored with his silences and needed to talk to people once in a while. I don’t mind mostly silent company but I have to let loose my thoughts and I was long overdue. We’d been driving the better part of a month without saying much. Get up in the morning, drive, stop, gas up and go on. Pull into some state rec area, sleep and do it all over again. Only the pots of coffee on the little burner in the munchkin kitchen in the back marked the passing days.
I tell Hank that he and I used to be on the opposite sides of some line. If I hadn’t crossed over and made a move, nothing would have happened. Now I cross the line, which in this case is the sandy gritty campground path that connects the tent sites to the restroom bathhouse. I’m headed for a young couple and soon enough I realize she is the same person we’d seen on 101. I offer Nina and Joe Sixpack a bag of marshmallows. I can tell Nina is reluctant to waste her time with him, because that’s what she calls him, Joe Sixpack. I hang around, toasting the marshmallows and keeping the conversation around firelight drifting upward instead of down into a silent gully of thought. Nina is sucking her beer bottle and complaining her life is not worth much, the other face of the girl who wants to make money packing Alaska salmon. Nina, I say, what you’re doing is an opportunity, not a mistake.
Nina holds court at Mono Campground, so named after the last great mononucleosis epidemic of 1969. Not really, but we entertained ourselves with such stories. We’d been here ten days now and Nina has installed herself as unofficial hostess.
As the days passed, Nina would come round, telling us how she lives in state parks and national lands. “It’s my land,” she’d say. “Your’s too. Take advantage of it. Stay as long as you like. Remember, these forests belong to we the American people.” I’d nod and smile and repeat what she said to Hank sulking under the plastic pull out awning, pretending to work the crossword puzzle. “It is her land, you see, Hank? And ours too. America, land of the free. This is a government forest, owned by the people, so she's living on her own property.” My voice might have climbed louder than necessary. I was trying to wake Hank up from his depression. On good days, he’d nod my way and pull his lips back in the mad-dog smile. Bad days, he’d ignore me. I just wanted some kind of reaction.
If anyone interesting pulls into the neighborhood, as we came to think of the campground, Nina invites them over for wine, dope and sounds. Before she became a witch, she said she was a singer in a rock band, back when she was in her teens. “I was the drummer’s old lady,” she said. “They had to let me sing or he wouldn’t play and the group had to have a drummer. Couldn’t play for nothing.” She's her own old lady now and at just twenty years, writes ballads about the meaning of life, too young to have a place to hold them down.
She bathes in the sulphur hot springs and talks to her dog Sugarfoot. “All bark, no bite, but they don't know that,” she confides, pulling shreds of Buglar tobacco out of the economy size can and piling it into rolling papers. “Hey Sugar, hey Foot: go kill, maim and scare,” she jokes at the dog, a mangy white cur that licked its hindquarters. She commands the dog to come without raising her head from cigarette rolling. I ask her where she got the tobacco. “Downtown, you know, in Carthage, east of Santa Barbara.” The joke was that there’s nothing east of Santa Barbara but mountains.
One time I asked her, “You ever get scared out on the road alone, sleeping in campgrounds? Not knowing where your next meal or ride was coming from?” Nina laughed, “Fear? Of what? Magic protects me,” she said. “I really am a witch; no one would mess with me.” Fooled me. Like Sugarfoot, she’s all bark, no muscle. I think Sugarfoot does his part; looks like a mean junkyard dog.
Later I hear her giggles while her orgasmic center rises to her mind's delight. She’s moved on from Joe Six to the ex-Navy guy in the big motor home. When I walk by, they’re sitting on folding chairs looking at the stars. “Have some wine and weed,” she urges. “Andy has some of the good stuff, Maui magic. Come on, let’s talk about things tragic and all that looks like magic.”
That sounds like a line from a song, I say. You should write that one up. Nina grimaces and pulls her guitar from behind the chair. “Sure, I’ll come by later when I’ve punched it out.”
Toting her guitar and Bugler can, lugging a stack of tattered songbooks, including her own lyrics recopied on three-hole lined school notebook paper, Nina enters our camp. She bangs out her twenty year old lament, her defensive answer to a world that has not dealt her well. She wants to go to Scotland and she wants to go to Budapest and see what her grandmother talked about.
“The name was Hanzlik in the old country. I’m Czech and White Russian.” She quotes bits and parts of a language that only a million people know. “There’s none of us left, she says, starting to slur her words. “The gypsies and witches, they killed us off. ‘Cept for some who went into hiding. ‘Zey killed us all off.”
Nina drinks cheap wine, slugging it back from the bottleneck. Now she’s sitting on a picnic table. The ex-Navy man is sloshed and amazed. He’s wandered over to see why she’s been gone so long. She says fuck a lot, but has no lasting interest in him, knows the difference between knaves. She’s telling about different men she’s known, maybe to shuck off Andy-the-Navy-guy’s interest, or maybe to stir him. On the one hand I want to give her my time and my ear, but she only wants to talk cheap. It's not new to me, this story.
She sings. “Jest mello down some backroad, bein’ native and naive, eatin’ weeds and grazing dope, sniffing each other's breeze. Me and this spring's lover, me and love me later. Sometimes my mind I play, sometimes each in a day. Beat the clock in the corridors of plenty, listen to the voices of unpublished rhyme, hum magic airwaves on the sundial.” The song is truly awful.
“It might be time for me to leave the Mono campground. Change my life,” she says, dragging on the Bugler. A scrap of tobacco from the end of the rolled cigarette sticks to her lip.
Sure enough, she hopped in our van the next morning, headed out with us to the highway west of Santa Barbara. The coast road, 101. Sugarfoot lay on the throw rug in the back and Nina hunched over her gear. I swiveled around in my shotgun seat so I could talk to her and still keep an eye on the road. Hank drove, nodded once in a while towards the side view window. Kept his peace when she lit up in the back. We didn’t allow smoking, usually, but I guess Hank allowed this exception.
We dropped her off in Christmas, California within sight of the big yellow house that she said was her sometime mother's. “I’ll stop off and see her for a while, then head up to Alaska. Time to get some money.” But in the rear-view mirror, I saw her stall around, put her knapsack and guitar on the ground, then stick out her thumb.
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