Giovanni Drive

Giovanni Drive is named after Giovanni Bisagno, a builder of houses throughout the hills of Placerville surrounding Mosquito Road.  Giovanni Drive is a short, steep street that branches off from Morrene Drive, which spans the hill where I grew up from one side to the other.  The street is about three minutes away from Highway 50 and the start of Main Street, so it’s not right in town and not that far away.  This rather high hill is littered with homes––many, many more now than when I was  growing up.  The area used to have a lot of woods in-between houses and it wasn’t so much filled with pine and oak trees as it was covered in manzanita.  Giovanni Drive itself only has four houses on it.  Across the street from the house where I grew up is a huge expanse of property that could be developed, but so far it has been left alone, so Giovanni seems unchanged.

Three of the four homes were built in the late 1960s.  Our house was the first one you came across on a trip down the hill and then there were two others across from each other at the end of the street.  Or, I should say at the end of the pavement, because the road seemed to keep going as a very steep dirt road that connected to Madrone Lane.  The original plan must have been to continue building homes all the way down, but it didn’t happen.  Eventually the dirt road grew over and the Madrone Lane entrance to Giovanni Drive was blocked off by a house built in a 1980s development boom and this helped to freeze Giovanni Drive.

That steep hill made for a lot of fun.  In the winter it was absolutely wonderful for snow sledding, though it was a pain to drive up to get out to the grocery store.  However, Placerville is about ten minutes below the usual snow line and so we only had a week or two of snow a year.  The rest of the year I had a go-cart race car that I would haul up to the top of the hill and race down––flying into the driveway.  My mother was always irritated by how I wore out my sneakers from using my feet as breaks.  Feet were the only way to regulate the speed and without feet one might speed out of control.  I did spin out once and it just so happens that my dad was there with the Super 8 movie camera to catch it.  As I come racing down from the top of the hill and zoom into the driveway I suddenly spin out, scraping my knee along the way.  Dad doesn’t stop filming, but catches me get off the car and steer it up the rest of the driveway, mouthing the words, “Ouch, ouch, ouch.”  The film cuts to a close up of my skinned knee, then the camera moves up to my concerned face when suddenly––I smile a big fake grin.  The sequence cuts right there.  It is a brilliant in-camera editing and story telling job.  You know my dad told me to smile at the camera, which makes it all the more hysterical because clearly I had just hurt myself and I wasn’t pleased.  I remember going up to the bathroom after that to have my knee cleaned up and bandaged.

I hauled that plastic race car up that hill to ride down until it simply fell apart.  Sometimes I would see Mr. Swansboro at the top of the hill, sitting on a chair backwards and looking out over the hills towards Swansboro Country––named for his family.  When he saw me appear at the top of Giovanni Drive, he would look down at me from his perch and whip his arm out and point towards my house in a silent, but effective gesture of “Get home!”  I’d race back down the hill as usual.  I would have liked to have reasoned with him, saying something like, “Mr. Swansboro, you don’t quite understand.  You see, I’m not trying to run away from home, I am simply going to ride my race car down Giovanni Drive and into my driveway.  In my circle, we call it having fun.”

Mrs. Swansboro was a good one for always having candy on hand and I regularly popped in to say hello in the hopes of a sweet handout.  My mother tells a story that I actually half remember: I might have been three years old, but I would take a little trail through our back yard, across Morrene Drive and up another little trail to the Swansboro lawn.  I would knock on the door and hope for a treat.  On this occasion, Mrs. Swansboro was horrified to see a little three year old boy in his pajamas at her door and promptly called my mother to report the incident.  I dashed back down the trail and into the house just as my mother had picked up the phone. When she was told that I was up at the Swansboro’s house she looked to her side and there I was innocently looking up at her.  This idea of just heading out into the neighborhood was something that expanded with time and in those days my brother Mark and I really weren’t too regulated about exploring the hills surrounding our neighborhood.  We were generally out of earshot a lot of the time.

I was often running late to catch the bus when I was in first grade and one morning my Mother made some sort of threat to me if I missed the bus.  I ran all the way to the bus stop and it was gone.  I decided that I would simply walk to school.  I knew the way well enough from riding the bus route every day.  Down at the bottom of the hill on Hocking Street––a little tract home development where all the tiny houses were exactly the same––a slightly older kid (he might have been in the third grade) befriended me and offered to show me the best way to the school.  We partially took the very narrow and dangerous Carson Road, with this helpful kid telling me all the way to watch out for cars.  He seemed to know his business and I felt safe in his hands.  I made it to school in time and all was well.  I guess I felt proud of myself, because I told my mother what I had done later on.  She was more astonished than angry and I wasn’t disciplined.  I never had the accidental occasion to walk to school again, though when I was a little older I sometimes rode my bike to school for the novelty of it.  Coming home from a bike trip lost its novelty when you hit Morrene Drive and had to push your bike up that big hill.  But, there was always that little thrill of coasting down Giovanni Drive at the end of the journey.

On my twelfth Birthday I received a ten speed bicycle and this became my main mode of transportation until I was able to drive.  I took that same bike to college and rode it to death––meaning that it fell apart during my junior year.  In Junior High School I became a bit of a biking fanatic and took rather long and grueling trips just for the challenge of it.  Coming back from these long trips reaching out to the county fairgrounds and even Cameron Park fifteen miles down the hill always had to end at the bottom of Morrene Drive.  You’d stare up at that steep hill, wishing that Mrs. Sullivan would come along with her van to give you a lift, but she rarely did, then up you’d climb to the top and after what seemed like a small eternity you’d get the relief of coasting down Giovanni.

When I was small, the bottom of Giovanni had a family called the Graffs.  The Graff daughters took turns baby-sitting my brother and me.  My father could stand out on our front deck and call down to the Graff house, “Who wants to baby-sit tonight?”  One of the girls would yell back that she was available and the deal was done.  By the time I was seven, the Graffs moved away and the Keatings moved in.  We were already friends with the Keatings, who had three boys––the middle boy, Steve, being my age exactly, so we lost the baby-sitters, but gained playmates.  Most of my friends in my very young years were always a drive away and there were few kids in my immediate neighborhood to play with.  My best friend was Jon Black, who moved when I was in first grade.  My other best friend was Derek Racina, who moved away when I was in second grade.  For all of my growing up, my brother and I devoted the majority of our time to Kim and Kristin Sullivan, who moved into the neighborhood about when I was five.  Kim was a grade younger than I and Kristin and Mark were in the same class and even went to preschool together.

There was a second group of kids that were a few years younger that emerged into my world as they got older, but the key players after the departure of Jon and Derek were the Sullivan girls and the Keating boys.  There was an empty lot, of sorts, next door to our house and one day Giovanni Bisagno came in with this crew and cut down the trees, cleared the area and built a new house.  My father had tried to buy the property at one point, but Mr. Bisagno was going to do better building and selling a house, so he did.  We gained two new friends our age when the Knochenhauer family moved in.  There were four kids: two older boys heading for high school and Jason and Heidi who were between the ages of me and Mark.  This band of kids helped fill out the long days on the hill where there wasn’t a lot to do, but sit out on a backwards chair and stare at the hills like Mr. Swansboro always did.  Kids could care less about pretty hills, so we just set out on the deer trails to try and find some sort of adventure and take care to not fall down a mine shaft.

Besides exploring the woods, my other way to pass the time was to put on a show.  My theatrical nature began with early Halloweens and continued on with the Placerville Children’s Theater, but these things didn’t fill up a year and so I created my own haunted houses, plays and puppet shows in our garage.  I was always creating something new out of not much and inviting the neighborhood kids to be the audience.  On the property above our house I carved out a little series of trails and dubbed it “Magicland.”  This was a kind of amusement park where we gave wheelbarrow rides and I kept the idea of a regular theme park going on weekends all through the sixth grade as long as the weather was good.  My parents still call that section of the property “Magicland.”

Across from the Keatings lived the Strouds.  Mrs. Stroud was my fourth grade teacher and they had a pool, which they opened up to the neighborhood in the summers.  We spent a lot of summer afternoons down at the Stroud’s pool.  This was a doughboy pool above ground with a deck built around it.  There was a nifty circular cave-like trail under the deck around the pool that was fun to crawl through.  My grandfather had given me a periscope one birthday and I snuck down to the Stroud’s to test it out.  Crawling under the deck I would poke the periscope up to see what the Strouds were doing, which was nothing except sunning themselves.  I thought for sure I was not detected, but my mother had received a call from Mrs. Stroud asking if the spies would please allow her family their privacy.

Summer time always meant the threat of forest fires and during the great drought of the 1970s, this threat seemed an even greater concern.  On several occasions, off in the distance, a billowing column of black smoke would rise into the air.  We’d listen to the news to find out if we needed to evacuate, but the fire never seemed to spread close enough to reach Placerville, though we could see and smell that smoke.  Only one time did my mother panic enough to start packing the car, though it seemed we were out of danger pretty quickly because we never drove out of the driveway before the danger was called off.  My father tells a story about a time when we had the family of his old high school friend Fred Towers visiting at the time of one of those threatening fires.  My mother and Rose Towers packed up four small children and took us down to the City Park while Fred and my father stayed back to defend the house from danger.  What they ended up doing was to turn the couch around to face our big picture window and kick back to watch the airplanes zoom over the hills fighting the fire.

Today the houses have received manicures to the yards, simple additions and subtractions here and there and fresh coats of paint.  The trees are taller and the road still needs to be repaved, but for all that it looks the same.  There are more wild animals traipsing through now: wild turkeys, lots of deer, coyotes and the very occasional bear.  Dogs are no longer wandering free, but are generally kept leashed or gated.  The bus stop at the crest of Morrene Drive is grown over and out of use, for there are no more children at the top of the hill.  Although the neighbors of Gionvanni Drive have changed over, many of the children’s parents, including my own, are still on that hill, but the streets are quiet on Halloween night.  No more do bunches of boys sled down Giovanni Drive on a snow day home from school, but other things are the same such as those same four houses, dogs barking at each other across the hills at twilight, the smell of fireplace smoke on crisp late fall evenings mixed with the pine and manzanita air.  And on those now rare occasions when I travel back home, there is always a reminder of the childhood years as I drive down Giovanni Drive and roll up the old driveway, just as I once did on my ten-speed or that plastic go-cart race car.