“Uh-huh. Still, you know. I’m sorry.”
All these apologies. And he’s going to have to give Sheila Mayer a call sometime, and apologize to her too. He groans at the thought. But he’s going to have to do it.
So Jim spends the afternoon pacing his little living room. He stares at his books. He’s much too restless to read. To be on his own, by himself—not today, though! Not today. He calls Hana again. No answer, no answering machine. “Come on, Hana, answer your phone!” But he can’t even tell her that.
Okay. Here he is. He’s alone, on his own, in his own home. What should he do? He thinks aloud: “When you change your life, when you’re a carbrain suddenly free of the car, off the track, what do you do? You don’t have the slightest idea. What do you do if you don’t have a plan? You make a plan. You make the best plan you can.”
Okay. He’s wandering the living room, making a plan. He walks around aimlessly. He’s lonely. He wants to be with his friends—the shields between him and his self, perhaps. But they’re all gone now, scattered by some force that Jim feels, obscurely, that he initiated; his bad faith started it all.… But no, no. That’s magical thinking. In reality he has had hardly any effect on anything. Or so it seems. But which is right? Did he really do it, did he really somehow scatter everyone away?
He doesn’t know.
Okay. Enough agonizing over the past. Here he is. He’s free, he and he only chooses what he will do. What will he do?
He will pace. And mourn Tashi’s departure. And rail bitterly against… himself. He can’t escape the magical thinking, he knows that it has somehow been all his fault. He’s lonely. Will he be able to adapt to this kind of solitude, does he have the self-reliance necessary?
But think of Tom’s solitude. My God! Uncle Tom!
He should go see Tom.
He runs out to the car and tracks down to Seizure World.
On the way he feels foolish, he is sure it’s obvious to everyone else on the freeway that he is doing something utterly bizarre in order to prove to himself that he is changing his life, when in reality it’s all the same as before. But what else can he do? How else do it?
Then as he drives through the gates he becomes worried; Tom was awfully sick when he last dropped by, anything can happen when you’re that old, and sick like he was. He runs from the parking lot to the front desk.
But Tom is still alive, and in fact he is doing much better, thanks. He’s sitting up in his bed, looking out the window and reading a big book.
“How are you, boy?” He sounds much better, too.
“Fine, Tom. And you?”
“Much better, thanks. Healthier than in a long time.”
“Good, good. Hey Tom, I went to the mountains!”
“Did you! The Sierras? Aren’t they beautiful? Where’d you go?”
Jim tells him, and it turns out Tom has been in that region. They talk about it for half an hour.
“Tom,” Jim says at last, “why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me about it and make me go up there?”
“I did! Wait just a minute here! I told you all the time! But you thought it was stupid. Bucolic reactionary pastoral escapism, you called it. Mushrooms on the dead log of Nature, you said.”
That was something Jim read once. “Damn my reading!”
Tom squints. “Actually, I’m reading a great book here. On early Orange County, the ranchero days. Like listen to this—when the rancheros wanted to get their cowhides from San Juan Capistrano to the Yankee trading ships off Dana Point, they took them to the top of Dana Point bluff, at low tide when the beach was really wide, and just tossed them over the side! Big cowhides thrown off a cliff like frisbees, flapping down through the air to land out there on the beach. Nice, eh?”
“Yes,” Jim says. “It’s a a lovely image.”
They talk a while longer about the book. Then a nurse comes by to shoo Jim away—visiting hours are over for a while.
“Jail’s closed, boy. Come back when you can.”
“I will, Tom. Soon.”
Okay. That’s one stop, one step. That’s something that will become part of the new life. All his moaning about the death of community, when the materials for it lay all around him, available anytime he wanted to put the necessary work into it.… Ah, well.
Okay. What else? Restlessly Jim tracks home, starts pacing again. He tries calling Hana, gets no answer. And no machine. Damn it, she’s got to be home sometime!
What to do. No question of sleep, it’s early evening and again this isn’t a night for it, he can tell. His head is too full. As a seasoned insomniac he knows there isn’t a chance.
He stops by his desk. Everything neatly in place, the torn-up and taped-together OC pages on top at one corner. He picks them up, starts to read through them.
As he does, the actual words on the page disappear, and he sees not OC’s past but the last few weeks. His own past. Each painful step on the path that got him here. Then he reads again, and the anguish of his own experience infuses the sentences, fills the county’s short and depressing history of exploitation and loss. Dreams have ended before, here.
Okay. He’s a poet, a writer. Therefore he writes. Therefore he sits down, takes up a sheet of paper, a ballpoint pen.
There’s a moment in OC’s past that he’s avoided writing about, he never noticed it before and at first he thinks it’s just a coincidence; but then, as he considers it, it seems to him that it has been more than that. It is, in fact, the central moment, the hinge point in the story when it changed for good. He’s been afraid to write it down.
He chews the end of the pen to white plastic shards. Puts it to paper and writes. Time passes.
82
This is the chapter I have not been able to write.
Through the 1950s and 1960s the groves were torn down at the rate of several acres every day. The orchard keepers and their trees had fought off a variety of blights in previous years—the cottony cushion scale, the black scale, the red scale, the “quick decline”—but they had never faced this sort of blight before, and the decline this time was quicker than ever. In these years they harvested not the fruit, but the trees.
This is how they did it.
Gangs of men came in with trucks and equipment. First they cut the trees down with chain saws. This was the simple part, the work of a minute. Thirty seconds, actually: one quick downward bite, the chain saw pulled out, one quick upward bit.
The trees fall.
Chains and ropes are tossed over the fallen branches, and electric reels haul them over to big dumpsters. Men with smaller chain saws cut the fallen trees into parts, and the parts are fed into an automatic shredder that hums constantly, whines and shrieks when branches are fed into it. Wood chips are all that come out.
Leaves and broken oranges are scattered over the torn ground. There is a tangy, dusty citrus smell in the air; the dust that is part of the bark of these trees has been scattered to the sky.
The stumps are harder. A backhoelike tractor is brought to the stump. The ground around the stump is spaded, churned up, softened. Chains are secured around the trunk, right at ground level, or even beneath it, around the biggest root exposed. Then the tractor backs off, jerks. Gears grind, the diesel engine grunts and hums, black fumes shoot out the exhaust pipe at the sky. In jerks the stump heaves out of the ground. The root systems are not very big, nor do they extend very deeply. Still, when the whole thing is hauled away to the waiting dumpsters, there is a considerable crater left behind.
The eucalyptus trees are harder. Bringing the trees down is still relatively easy; several strokes of a giant chain saw, with ropes tied around the tree to bring it down in the desired direction. But then the trunk has to be sawed into big sections, like loggers’ work, and the immense cylinders are lifted by bulldozers and small cranes onto the backs of waiting trucks. And the stumps are more stubborn; roots have to be cut away, some digging done, before the tractors can succeed in yanking them up. The eucalyptus have been planted so close together that the roots have intertwined, and it’s safest to bring down only every third tree, then start on the ones left. The pungent dusty smell of the eucalyptus tends to overpower the citrus scent of the orange trees. The sap gums up the chain saws. It’s hard work.