A Note From Crystal Finn, playwright of Find Me Here

I wrote Find Me Here in the early months of the pandemic, in a house in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, near where I grew up. The house had been my Grandparent’s for decades and was the place they both had died.  It is not an especially remarkable house. But the view from the house is remarkable.  To the front is a forest of pine and cedar and high mountain scrub. The rear extends a few yards from the house before reaching a cliff which drops sharply down to the California Feather River. Penman Peak, the highest of a ridge of sloping mountains in the Mohawk Valley, cradles the river and is a constantly shifting canvas of grey and purple.

I had never seen the house change from winter to spring. It took a long time. The snow was deep that year.  Gold Lake Highway, which is the only road up to Lake’s Basin, where my grandparents had run a boys camp for twenty-five years, and where my mother and her sisters had spent their childhoods, was not even passable till May. 

The first day the road opened up we drove to the lakes and tried to hike up to the lowest spot we could below the Buttes. One mile up, through the snow, it started hailing and my daughter cried that it was a sign from the sky to turn back. Before we did, we caught a glimpse of the first lake, buried half in snow, the water black and dark along the shore. 

When the snow finally melted, the grass in the front yard emerged already bright green. A family of deer started coming every day at noon to lie in the shade, and my daughter and I would eat our lunch by the window, watching them. Then she would leave for the bedroom to listen to her Harry Potter audio book, and I would stay put, sometimes for hours.  

There was nothing to do. My life was on pause. Theater was dead. I watched the river. I marked the snow-pack each day. I looked at the mountain which always was its least beautiful in mid-day, and tried to find the source of each impression of color it gave to me: trees were green, boulders were grey, an unidentifiable blending of sky and rock was purple. Thin clouds would move in in the late afternoon and curl around the peaks, diving them into segments. The tops became bright with the sun, the bottoms dull brown under the shadow of the clouds.

My Grandmother had told me that when her sister, my great Aunt, had died, they scattered her ashes at the top of that peak and had put a light there to mark the spot, so that when my Grandmother did the dishes she could look out the window and see the light.

At night, in the house, I washed the dishes at the same sink and looked out at the same peak. I didn’t see any light. But I thought of my grandmother and her two sisters. And I thought of my mom and her two sisters.

The mountains in Find Me Here aren’t named.  Neither are the lakes. They could be a lot of mountains, a lot of lakes. In the end,  the play I wrote wasn’t really about those places. It was about the people who lived there. It was about what they saw. The mountains, the river, the lakes belong to them.