Author Joan Didion punctured California narratives with potato masher

LOS ANGELES — Can a single object contain within it the narratives of a family and an entire nation? If so, for Joan Didion that item may have been a potato masher.

The masher in question — a humble kitchen implement whose creation dates to the first half of the 19th century — made the arduous overland journey west some time in 1846-87 with her ancestors, the Cornwalls, a faction of the Donner-Reed Party that had been smart (or lucky) enough to make for Oregon instead of California once they hit Humboldt Sink, Nev., thereby avoiding a winter impasse in the Sierra Nevada, not to mention one of the most infamous episodes of cannibalism in American history.

Sacralized by family lore and over a century and a half of American history, the masher served as deadpan literary device for Didion in her 2003 nonfiction collection about California, “Where I Was From.” She writes of a relative, Oliver Huston, “a family historian so ardent that as recently as 1957 he was alerting descendants to ‘an occasion which no heir should miss,’ the presentation to the Pacific University Museum of, among other artifacts, ‘the old potato masher which the Cornwall family brought across the plains in 1846.’”

“I have not myself found occasion to visit the potato masher,” Didion declares dryly. But the masher nonetheless makes several appearances in her book — and its looming presence is even echoed in its final paragraphs.

I have been unable to determine whether Didion ever laid eyes on the masher of manifest destiny. But thanks to an archivist, as well as a communications rep at Pacific University, a liberal arts college in Forest Grove, Ore., who gamely responded to my email about a potato masher on Christmas Eve, I was able to ascertain that it remains in the museum collection — along with other 19th century objects donated by Huston, including a handbag, a black cape and a lap desk.

The overland crossing is such a hallowed narrative in American history that it can render an object as mundane as a potato masher preservation-worthy. And it is precisely that narrative that Didion tackles in the unblinking “Where I Was From,” which like many of Didion’s works actually began as a magazine article: “The Golden Land,” a 1993 essay published in the New York Review of Books.

Didion, who died last week at the age of 87, was a master of tugging at the threads of established narratives until nothing was left but a tangled heap.

In “Where I Was From,” Didion takes a seam ripper to the psyche of California, a state whose modern, Anglo identity is built on a narrative of hardy can-do spirit, one shaped by a rigorous overland crossing that, as she writes, had undertones of a “moral or spiritual” test. “Each arriving traveler had been, by definition, reborn in the wilderness,” she wrote, “a new creature in no way the same as the man or woman or even child who had left Independence or St. Joseph however many months before.”

In other words, a journey that could make of a potato masher a revered historical artifact.