Mill Street, Grass Valley

Passing through

History as an event horizon

History is not about the past. It is about how people now living want to envision the past, to impute meanings to their present conditions and future hopes.

History is thus a lump of clay for the living to play with -- a cornucopia of documents, artifacts, and imperfect memories -- to satisfy the need of the living to explain where they came from and where they are going.

However concocted, and however told, all histories turn out to be stories cut from the same cloth as tales, yarns, and novels. They are stitched together from facts, hearsay, opinions, beliefs, myths, fables, and imagination.

In other words, histories are mixtures of truth, fiction, and ideology. And the best histories are those that induce people to consume, digest, assimilate, and believe every word, true or false.

Why else write them?

As stories, histories are romps through space and time, narratives of adventures and escapades, happenings and events, incidents believed to have occurred during a given period at a given place. Whether an historian regards the past synchronically and locally, or diachronically and regionally or globally, the past is never static -- never fixed in space or time -- but is always unfolding and shifting on the horizons of time and space.

Peopling the world

Nevada County is a politically defined territory. Its history begins from the moment the county was created from a rib of Yuba County on 25 April 1851. As a legal and administrative territory, it is nested within a Russian doll of other politically constructed domains, including California and the United States, within North America, and the New World or Western Hemisphere.

Nevada County also has a prehistory, which embraces everything discoverable, knowable, and believable about the succession of human life that has passed through or inhabited its hills, mountains, valleys, and canyons -- "from time immemorial", to put a poetic gloss on everything that has transpired within the county's 4-dimensional "event horizon". And the county's territory -- apart from the waves of humanity that have invaded and occupied it over the centuries and millennia -- has a history of its own, in the eons of geological events that continue to structure and shape the land as we know it today.

The peopling of the world is a fascinating story that will probably never be more than only partly understood. What is known with a high degree of certainty, though, from the recent histories of just the past few millennia or so, is that the spread of domination from one human community to another has mostly been achieved through the sort of red-in-tooth-and-claw behaviors that seem to characterize the collective herd instincts of nations.

As social animals, people congregate and organize themselves as political communities. Religious beliefs and ideologies have motivated kindness and cruelty, sometimes in the same breath. The pathologies of racialist and ethnonationalist thinking have encouraged some of the most heinous crimes against humanity within modern times.

The past is not something that any individual alive today can rightly or honestly either excuse or apologize for. The past is what it was, and the only meaningful questions today are how to digest the past, assimilate its lessons, and nurture peaceful solutions to the world's myriad problems, for the sake of survival in the future. This will not be possible without recognizing that humans are merely another species of animal that needs air, water, and food above all else -- and places to poop, feel secure, and love. Nor will it be possible without learning how to tame and defang the flag waving hearts that beat in the chests of nations.

Today the world has "filled up", and national and other borders are defended more diligently than ever. Yet people continue to have reason to migrate -- individually or as families, if not en masse -- to the consternation of those who would like to pull up the gang plank right after they have stumbled aboard. The imperative to improve ones circumstances by moving somewhere else, clashes with the imperative to protect what one has gone to the trouble to secure and rope off from the hordes.

Memory and context

While some historians like to isolate historical or even current events for the purpose of focus, no event is truly solitary in the larger scheme of things. Freezing any event in a single frame of reference inevitably results in the loss of what has come be known as "context" -- everything relevant to an event, before, during, and after the event -- everything that engendered the event, sustained it, and resulted from it. Imposing beginnings, middles, and ends on stories is likely to result in the distortion of vital information, not only through loss but also embellishment and interpretation.

In the real world, though, it is often difficult to establish singular causes and effects. You can attribute an accident to alcohol, texting, excess speed, or paying more attention to someone walking along the street than to the street. But then you have to ask why the driver was drinking, texting, driving too fast, or staring at the pedestrian. And answers to such question beg more questions -- if one is interested in "facts" and "factual history". And in some cases, honest answers to inconvenient questions -- that seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the cold, unembellished truth -- can be shocking.

The stories I am telling here are drawn from my personal history. They include episodes I recall of my experiences while passing through life, on my way from my incidental cradle in San Francisco where my mother happened to be at the time she dopped me -- to my inevitable grave in Japan, or wherever I may be at the time I am found "unresponsive" and declared dead.

While directing most of my attention at what I witnessed when passing through Grass Valley in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, I will also at times describe experiences in San Francisco before moving to Nevada County, in Berkeley where I lived three times while going to college, and in other places I've lived on my way to Japan, where I've lived for the past 50 years, now as a Japanese national. And of course I will share my impressions of how Nevada County -- but especially Grass Valley, and Mill and Main streets -- have changed, based on occasional visits when my parents and sister were alive, and my views across the Pacific through the Internet.

My memory seems to be fairly good, some friends have said excellent. Yet inevitably it is sometimes selective and fuzzy. I have quite a few personal documents, appointment books, and dated photographs -- and boxes of detritus my folks collected over the decades, refusing to throw anything away -- all of which have become the dots that I have tried to connect with the lines of narrative stories.

My apologies for occasionally long and convoluted sentences, grammar busts, and variant spellings. The punctuation is for lips that read and eyes that hear.

William Wetherall
Abiko, 25 July 2025