From the Travel Desk of the Rootless Metropolitan

Filed under Detritus: Mal’Poetica

A ring of fire, a ring of memory—flaring once again in a McCloud travel memory.

Day Five: Embedded in the Smoke Ring of History

By The Rootless Metropolitan

It’s day five on the Ring of Fire Tour along the Western volcano trail, and somehow—whether through fate, accident, or some old-world migratory instinct—we’ve landed in McCloud, California.

How did we know to book this place? We didn’t. But the land, it seems, remembered us.

As we rolled into town, we spotted a fountain out front of the Chamber of Commerce—crafted, as it turns out, by someone with a very Italian surname. A quick walk confirmed the signs: Tucci Street, trattoria-style signage, a few lingering businesses with Italian names fading into their stucco.

Turns out McCloud was the site of an international labor standoff in 1909—sparked by striking Italian lumbermen.¹ they originated from both north and south in Italy. That same year, on the other side of the world, a devastating earthquake leveled southern Italy. The psychic fault lines were not just geologic. The emigrants brought their grief with them, and—when provoked—lit a match.

Our tour guides had no idea. We found out only minutes ago, while sipping scorched bed&breakfast coffee and watching the clouds roll off Mount Shasta like steam from an espresso.

And then, as if prompted by some ancestral algorithm, we recently discovered: one of our favorite country/bluegrass singer-songwriters is also Italian.² —Not to mention, Alison Krauss⁴ who is also part Italian from her maternal side. Which only deepened the sense of embeddedness. We weren’t just passing through—we were being folded into Americana.

Even the name California started to feel Italian. And why not?

Some scholars trace it back to the Latin phrase calida fornax—“hot furnace.”³

It was first used in a 16th-century Spanish romance novel to describe a mythical sun-scorched paradise ruled by a warrior queen. A fantasy land forged in fire.

And really, what better name for a region defined by earthquakes, wildfires, and molten memory?

The Ring of Fire Tour didn’t just carry us through volcano country—it returned us to the furnace from which California was cast.

An old name. A hot name. And, somehow, a little bit Italian if you squint and stir the vowels.

In honor of this unplanned homecoming, our own Black Cloud has adapted a song that captures that strange moment when a place you’ve never lived in welcomes you like a scar that never quite healed.

FEELS LIKE HOME

A Song Reimagined on the Edge of the Ring of Fire about another state, but what could be more Americana than California paired with Pennsylvania. This is not said in any way to slight Illinois—which is quintessentially of America in its own ill and annoyed way. (See Chicago and die)

By Irene DeMaria Kelley / Adapted by Black Cloud

🎶You can take a trip

But you can’t go back

Too many times I’ve heard that—

It’s prettier in McClouded memory

And just today a north wind came

Tapped my shoulder

Brought the grey

And a chill I know by heart came over me

Feels like home

Though I never felt at home there

And I know that the winters were too long

Like the wind against the shutters

In a town I used to know

Anytime it looks like rain

It feels like home

You can change the present

But not the past

Too many times I’ve heard that

Days like these

Don’t scare me anymore

There was a time when one blue breeze

Knocked me down to my knees

Now all it does is open up a door🎶

Footnotes & Further Tracings

[1]The McCloud Strike of 1909: Local unrest led by Italian lumbermen—sparked by wage cuts, harsh conditions, and familiar echoes of transatlantic struggle. For more, see The California Military Museum.

[2]Irene Kelley (née DeMaria): A bluegrass singer-songwriter whose Italian roots surface in both name and tone. Her lyrical sensibility often bends toward the bittersweet—ideal for Council fieldwork.

[3]Calida Fornax: Latin for “hot furnace,” possibly the root of the name California. It first appeared in Las Sergas de Esplandián, a 1510 Spanish novel of chivalric fantasy. We suspect it was whispered during volcanic dreams and shouted over dinner in dialect.

[4]Alison Krauss, whose mother is of Italian descent, is best known for her crystalline soprano vocals and fiddle work in bluegrass and Americana. Though her exact Italian lineage is unspecified in public records, her musical phrasing sometimes feels like it wandered out of a sun-drenched Italian church and took a detour through Appalachia. Any confusion with the other Sopranos—whose fictional lineage hails from Naples—is purely a product of some screenwriter imagination.