It is like this here: Get off the interstate, get anywhere off of it and drive away, onto State Route 16 to Gold Country, or Route 36 into Trinity Wilderness, or 178 toward the Piutes. Find a smaller road and take it, then a smaller road, and take that — the one that squiggles like a heartbeat’s trace along a skinny ridge; the one that winds through an endless wold of identical hummocks; the road cut that is barely road or cut, cinched tight across the midsection of sheer mountain wall; or the straightaway that shoots into the empty flats below you and fades into the distant haze, becoming more an erasure of a road than a road itself. Keep going. Go past signs with the names of towns on them that make you chuckle: Peanut and Fiddletown and Raisin City, Three Rocks and Copperopolis, Look Out and Rescue and Honeydew. Listen to the static on your radio, which picks up nothing here in the middle of nowhere. Marvel at how fucking big this state is. Allow yourself to be seduced by notions of vastness and desolation. Do this, and a pickup truck crammed with paint cans and ladders, or bundles of steel pipe or a dining-room set, will rise up and loom in your mirrors and rattle past you like the clamorous armies of Death himself, late for the Apocalypse. Do this, and in the middle of boundless farmland devoid of human landmark to all horizons, you will come across a sprinkler going. On the shoulders of derelict roads you will see mailboxes huddled like abandoned old men, weathered and stooped, and among them, today’s paper inside a bright blue tube. Around a curve that brings into view an unbroken panorama of brown mesas and buttes, you will see graffiti, bold and crass, painted high on a rock face: baroque gang tags or cryptic acronyms, or GO TITANS! or I LOVE YOU VANESSA! Chained to a lone dead tree you will see a lidless rust-chancred garbage can — forsaken, forlorn, God’s Last Garbage Can — filled with fresh, logoed trash from Taco Bell and Hardee’s. At sunset, the spectacular scenery that you’ve begun to ignore will recede into shadows, into night, until you are hurtling through a tube of darkness. In the wedge of your headlights the road sweeps under you, and there is only the ember glow of the dashboard, and the thump and thrum of the tires, and the static on the radio turned low and hissing steady like a whisper of distant rain. And just when you succumb once again to the romance of solitude, you see lights up ahead. You tap your brakes, and this is what glides past you — a neat little cottage with a fence and a lawn, the porch light a fever of beetles and moths; in the windows, the water of light from a TV; from the chimney, a steady white finger of smoke; and in the gravel driveway, a freshly washed car, beaded and gleaming. And then it is gone, sailing into the night, and for a moment you’re not sure you saw what you saw. But there it is, glimmering small and bright in your rearview mirror for a long time, until it finally drops into a dip of road behind you. And you realize you couldn’t get lost here if you tried. And you’ve tried. The middle of nowhere is always somewhere for somebody.
Down a densely wooded gorge in the Siskiyou Mountains, the bones of a hiker lie scattered in the underbrush, long picked clean by coyotes and crows and grown brown and mossy in the cool dirt. Inside the mud at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay, hundreds of commuters rustle and sway on trains rattling through the Transbay Tube. In a ninth-floor dorm room on the UCLA campus, two students who’ve just tearfully broken up have breakup sex on a futon in the corner. One room over, a young woman gingerly presses her entire body against the wall to listen, rapt as an acolyte apprehending the mystery of the divine. And four floors down, an unfinished letter to Mom sits atop the rubble of a desk. Its last line is: I hate it here. And its author is cross-legged on the floor, tearing the pages from hundred-dollar engineering textbooks and gazing as if sun blind into a floodlit vision of disappointment and ruin.
In an efficiency studio high up a tower block in Bakersfield, or in an upscale-ish condo on the fringes of a dicey neighborhood in Inglewood, or in an in-law unit wedged beneath a house that clings to the Oakland Hills, or in a loft or duplex or railroad flat in Rio Linda or Citrus Heights or Gilroy, you are watching TV.
You are sitting in a leather club chair in the middle of an otherwise spare room. You are home early from the office, having feigned a headache worse than the one you really do have. You are drinking a beer, watching the local news anchor read. Her name is Wendy Something, and you have a crush on her. You moved here only months ago — from Cedar Falls, from Monroe or Meridian, from Canton, Grand Forks, Eau Claire — and you have yet to make friends. The weekly drink with coworkers has drifted into a less occasional gathering, then none at all, as you’ve gradually discovered you have little in common, and you get along well at work anyway, so why even bother? People are hard to get to know out here, inside their bubbles, with their benign, almost tender indifference toward you and their studious gestures of intimacy — the banter that is devoid of subtext and the How-are-you! that is never a question and the See-you-later! that simply signals the end of conversation. It has been lonely. You come home in the evenings and eat a take-out burrito over the kitchen sink and stroll through your half-furnished rooms, with books in alphabetized stacks on the floor and unpacked boxes as end tables and nothing on the walls. You have pondered this metaphor for an unfinished life — or better, the beginning of a new one — and you remind yourself why you moved here, why everyone moves here. And you may be lonely like this forever, but out here at least it feels transitory — a step on a journey, a blip on a timeline, and all that.
Joists groan overhead. A window frame stutters in its casement and is shot open. A kitchen chair is scraped across a floor. Movement above you. The sound of other people.
The sun will set within the hour. It is a time of day you love, between the room growing dark and you turning the lights on.
They crow about their light out here. In the early twentieth century, artists came in droves to paint in California light, adjusting color schemes and developing a choppy brushstroke and applying the paint quickly so as to capture on canvas the fleeting quality of the light — the “temporal fragment,” the “instantaneous view.” Out here they go on about how the light chisels, how it polishes and defines the edges of whatever it falls upon and imparts a dazzling clarity. They go on about how the light comes down around you in curtains or how it pours and spills like honey. It gleams and glints, it sparks and flares. The light has weight, it has density, it is palpable. Sometimes you can even hear it, zinging metallic and bright! What crap. When they aren’t steeped in the clichéd golden hues of a shampoo commercial, the skies most days are an insipid palette of white and bluish white and yellowish white. Every vista is dull and bleary, a sun-bleached smudge in the distance. And nothing is chiseled. Everything you look at is foreshortened, flat and common as a souvenir poster. Although there can be days — those mornings of unseasonable fog when the sunlight is filtered through a fragile veil of cloud that renders the air itself luminous as milk; or the clear, cloudless afternoon when you’re walking under a canopy of trees or through the lobby of a building downtown, and just before moving out of the shade, you take off your sunglasses and stand there a moment and anticipate entering the world of sunlight.