Each of the Narrators, Augusta, Kaye, and Calvin have their own paths through the various Journeys.  In The Journey South, Comets in the Yard, Kaye introduces herself, tells her Backstory, and begins the Legends, Family Myths, Geological Certainties, and Star Lore that provide a different dimension to the Califia story .

Kaye's Backstory

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I believed, as Seekers will, that desire was always  fulfilled.  I'd look up at the stars and imagine the way it might feel to step out on a beam of light and travel along the highway of dreams.

Cities of gold, lost mines, and hidden riches were always possible there.  It was the world of early seafarers, sifting through the mud of the bays and estuaries of La Isla de California for pearlsName=Pearls; HotwordStyle=BookDefault; .  Where survivors of a Spanish shipwreck walked thousands of miles, tracking the vision of Cibola.Name=Cibola; HotwordStyle=BookDefault;   Coronado followed.  Before the faithful had given up the dream of Indian villages paved in gold, ore was discovered in the creek beds and hills—gold nuggets as big as a bear's head, and silver, too.  In the rush, fortunes were made and lost, and hidden, and forgotten.  And wished back into existence.

The stories haunted the California landscape where I grew up, in a small house in Santa Monica.  Tales of gold whispered in the winter fog, jumped carelessly off the cliffs above the ocean, sold grass in Topanga, slept in the kelp beds, wandered Sunset Boulevard, shuttledHotwordStyle=BookDefault;  through the stars of a windy night, sat at the dinner table on cool evenings. 

My dad, Henry, mourned his losses, Philo and Nellie Clare. Dad was seven years old when Philo was killed in a plane crash with Erskine SummerlandName=Erskine Summerland; HotwordStyle=Frame; , and he was only fifteen when Nellie Clare disappeared.  But he seemed not to notice that their spirits were with us.

So he never dared to step out on the highway of light.  He went nowhere but to the U.S. Post Office on Wilshire Boulevard— where he worked all his life, waiting for Philo to materialize, Nellie ClareName=Nellie Clare; HotwordStyle=BookDefault;  to reincarnate. 

Henry was waiting for Nellie to show up in 1954, when I was born—was still waiting when he died in 1964, paper in hand, scanning the news, as always, for the ghost face on the third page.

Mae, my mother, seemed relieved that the years were over with the handsome, dreamy, boring postman.  She wasted no time in landing a second husband, settling happily into the life she wanted all along:  a club woman with tickets to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  We moved to Hancock Park.  I never tried to fit in with the social life—all the cotillion parties in the world could not make me belong, there.  But the spirits stayed to keep me company.  And I listened carefully to everything they said.

When I was fifteen, Mae sent me away to a fancy private school to make me normal.  I just felt more isolated, and the spirits gathered more closely around.

 I got a degree in geology and then moved to a commune in Simi Valley.  When the others drifted away, back to jobs at the malls or into the therapy business, I stayed on, working as a part-time surveyor, taking in boarders, telling fortunes, following the path of enlightenment.

The spirits directed me in the search.  I recreated the Beveridge history of 150 years and then confirmed it.  I collected letters and information from the L.A. Court House, libraries, and junk stores.

Sometimes the right information just fell in my hands, sometimes I was led to it.  Patience is good—and a willingness to be diverted for months by a lover or a falling star.

Nellie Clare and PhiloHotwordStyle=Frame; , gold-hunting spirits.  We live where planes fly into mountains in bright daylight, where a woman leaves a

hand-drawn map at a drug-store counter in Palmdale and is never heard from again.