When I was born, my family and I lived deep in the Santa Cruz mountains in an area called Lompico. It was apparently infamous in the 60s and 70s for being a good place to hide a body and featured a heavy Hell's Angels presence back when they were something to be feared.

Our house was once the fire station for the valley, and featured some interesting artifacts on the property, including a small disused water tower up the hill that animals would get trapped in a lot.

My earliest memories were of traipsing up and down the dirt road surrounded by redwood trees. I remember seeing my first banana slug just at the end of my family's driveway and marveling at what it could possibly be.

Those early days were about as idyllic as could be. My Dad set up a tire swing hanging from a rope that dangled over a steep cliffside, and my Mom would push me along it and sing to me. What's the old cliche? We were poor but we were happy.

That changed in October of 1989. I remember the whole week pretty clearly. There had been a lot of rain and my Dad and brother went to work on repairing the roof. The house was filled with pots and pans collecting dripping water, and I could see them in the crawlspace above taking off old planks and replacing them, so far away it seemed like they were almost in the sky. During the day, I would be so lonely while the adults were working, and one day I tried to climb onto the roof to join them and my Mom sat me down gently and put on Alvin and the Chipmunks for me. I remember being so amazed that she knew they would be on.

Sometime during that week, my family was browsing channels one night and came across the ending minutes of the Terminator. My family didn't know what it was. Keep in mind this was before the giant hype train that came with Terminator 2, it hadn't entered the cultural consciousness they way it exists now. My Dad thought it was Robocop, which I loved and so I wanted to watch it. Actually hold on, why did a three year old know Robocop? Anyway, when Arnold's truck crashed and burned off all his skin and the horrid skeletal terminator appeared, I started screaming. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen at that point.

On October 14, my Dad finished the roof. My Dad would later describe these three days to me as the most perfect of his life. On October 17, it wouldn't matter.

My Mom took us for our daily walk on the dirt road that wrapped around the top of the mountain. On our way back, we passed an old abandoned house on stilts on the side of the mountain and wandered in at my behest, being curious. We found dozens of wire coat hangers sitting in a pile at the bottom of the empty shell, and my Mom was so happy to have found such a useful treasure.

We came home, and my Mom gave me a yogurt and went to take a nap while I watched Sesame Street. They were doing the alphabet when it started.

The whole world began to shake, and it didn't stop. I started to feel uneasy, when my Mom ran in and grabbed me. I didn't see her and I thought for a moment I was being grabbed by my current biggest fear, skeletons. In that moment, the chimney at the far end of the room exploded, sending bricks into the house. We tried to get out the front door but it was jammed.

We ran out the back through our narrow kitchen, and the refrigerator fell over, blocking our path. My Mom pushed me over the top while she climbed under it through a small space. We ran out the back door and around the side of the house against the mountain.

I watched rocks tumble down the side of the mountain and I thought I could hear a far off roar or growl coming from the world itself. I asked my Mom if it was a monster, and she said yes.

My Dad came home a moment later. That was the day my family had made their way out of debt, and so he bought a big trunk full of groceries he was going to surprise my Mom with. We spent the night in a hotel near the Board Walk in Santa Cruz, along with a lot of other people. My Dad got me a transformers toy, Bugley, which is apparently worth quite a bit now.

In the days after, my family and I would wander the streets of Santa Cruz, marveling at the destruction. The Pacific Garden Mall was in ruins. My Mom held my hand in the concrete walled basement levels of the county building, where it was so quiet and cold. We waited for my brother as the workers came down to the cafeteria for lunch.

My family started staying with my brother's girlfriend's family. They broke up at some point during this. She got me a backpack that looked like a raccoon.

My Mom and I took the bus to meet my Dad at the company he had recently started working at, Seagate. We got lost and encountered a man and his son driving in an old open topped automobile who drove us the one block we were away. I fell in love with crappy snack truck food all the workers seemed so excited for.

We went up to the house to get what we could out. My Dad had a large friend, a one armed man named Bandit (that was his entire name, legally) bust open the door. One day, we went up there and the house wasn't there anymore. The county deemed it unsafe and had it demolished. Apparently one tap of the bulldozer was enough to tumble it off the mountain.

My Mom and my Dad cried.

We moved to Seascape some days later. It was a fairly tightly packed suburb that led right up to a cliffside that overlooked a beautiful seemingly endless beach in the south part of the county.

My parents would take me down there all the time. I would marvel at all the large pieces of driftwood, some of which was used to make beachside bonfires, and I thought they were elephant bones. I began to think that the whole world was made up of endless beaches.

One evening, my parents and my brother took me down to the shore to watch the sunset. I'd never seen it set before and I was very bored, but as it touched the horizon I thought I saw it melt into a world of different colors of reds and greens and purples. I have no idea where that came from, but I remember not understanding why it was doing that.

My folks tried to get the house rebuilt, but unfortunately FEMA couldn't help, the retaining wall needed to be rebuilt to comply with new standards and it would cost as much to do so as to buy a new house. That's still the case for the empty property to this day, even accounting for the insane housing inflation.

My Mom started to have the first episodes I can remember her having. My brother tells me they started before I was born and did happen in Lompico, but I didn't notice them until this point. She became volatile towards everyone around her, sometimes becoming unpredictably violent toward me, especially when I was a typical high energy child.

One day my Mom had a bad episode and attacked my brother. He pushed her off of him and my Dad threw him out in some mentally addled attempt to keep things stable. He found a tiny place in Santa Cruz for a decent price.

I woke up one morning and the police were arresting her, forcing her into the back of a patrolcar while she screamed. My Dad never told me what happened, exactly. I asked him if Mom was a bad guy and he said she wasn't, that she just needed help. After a stay in the hospital for the day, she came home and started to tell me that Dad was a bad guy afterwards. I started to understand that I couldn't always trust what she said and did.

My Dad started to get me a lot of toys in those days. GI Joes were my favorites, but I also loved Transformers, and they usually would be played with pretty heavily, some of them not surviving. Cartoons were abundant, and I would spend my days watching weird koala cartoons on Nickelodeon while my Mom slept, and then catching the good stuff in the afternoon starting with Heathcliff and Dennis the Mennis.

There was a group of really cool teenagers around the corner, who always hung out in their garage and wore cool 80s shades and visors and neon colors. They would always encourage me not to wander too far from home. I would sometimes listen.

While my Mom slept most of the day, I eventually figured out how to cut through people's yards and even open sliding glass doors to have "shortcuts" through the neighborhood while people were out during the day. It was also a handy way to keep to my Dad's rule about not crossing the street if I could instead cut through backyards and circle around cul de sacs. I remember feeling like I had found a series of secret worlds between the streets.

Soon after, my parents started putting me into daycare while my Mom started at the community college. Between all the expenditures and my brother's absence, we couldn't afford to live there anymore and soon moved to the same part of town my brother had moved to, much to his chagrin.

I miss Seascape sometimes. It wasn't the best time, being a free range child always getting into trouble while my Mom depression napped her life away and my Dad poured himself into his job for every scrap of overtime he could get. Regardless, it's probably the time of my life that feels the most like childhood, and in many ways reminds me of how my life feels now.

I remember one morning waking up before the sun rose, and watching an episode of the Super Mario cartoon. The ground started to shake, and I knew the monster was back.

It stopped after a moment and I looked out the window to see if I could catch a glimpse of it. I spotted a garbage truck driving off and I wondered if that must be the monster, staring as its crew continued to work, banging cans loudly against the truck and the sidewalk.

I just stood there in the dark watching it disappear into the mist.