“Nor roads neither,” Lee added.
We slid off the side of the handcar, and started up a trail that was the only passage through thick forest. It was more like what Tom called a jungle: ferns and creepers and vines wove the densely set trees together, and every lichen-stained branch was locked in a struggle for sunlight with ten other branches. Knots of torrey pine competed with trees I’d never seen the likes of before. There was a damp smell to the spongy trail, and fungus or bright green ferns grew on every log that had fallen across our path. Behind me Tom muttered as he walked, thumping his shoulder bag against his side. “Mount Soledad just another wet north face now. All the houses washed down. All fall down, all fall down.” Lee, striding ahead of me, turned and gave Tom a funny look. I knew just what the look meant: it was hard to believe Tom had been alive when these ruins had stood whole. Tom cursed as he kicked a root and mumbled on, unaware of Lee’s glance. “Flood and mud, rain and pain, lightning blast and fire burn, all fall down. And all that terrible construction. Ah ha, there’s a foundation. Was that one Tudor? Chinese? Hacienda? California ranch?” “What’s that?” Jennings called back, thinking he had heard a question. But Tom talked on: “This town was everything but itself. Nothing but money. Paper houses; this hill sure looks better with all that shit washed away. I wish they could see it now, hee hee hee.”
On the ocean side of the hill it was a different story. Where the hillside leveled off, forming a point that thrust out from the coast on either side, all the trees had been cleared away. In this clearing a few old buildings were surrounded by small wooden houses. The concrete walls of the old buildings had been repaired with redwood, and the new houses had been put together with fragments of the old, so that some had massive roof beams, others wide chimneys, others orange tile roofs. Most of the houses had been painted white, and the old concrete had been painted pale shades of blue or yellow or orange. As we descended the west side of the hill we caught sight of the clearing through the leaves, and the little village in it shone against the backdrop of the dark blue ocean. We came out of the overhanging branches of the forest, and the trail widened into a straight street paved with thick grass.
“Paint,” Tom observed. “What a good idea. But all the paint I’ve seen lately has been hard as rock.”
“Wentworth has a way to liquefy it,” Jennings said. “Same way he liquefies old ink, he tells me.”
“Who is this Wentworth?” I said.
“Come and find out,” said Jennings in reply.
At the far end of the street of grass, just above a small cove, was a low building made of tan blocks of stone. A wall made of the same sort of blocks surrounded the place, and torrey pines stood against the wall on both sides. We walked through a big wooden gate that had a tiger carved into it, a green tiger with black stripes. Inside the wall, grass alternated with patches of flowers. Jennings looked in the open door of the building, and waved us in after him.
The first room had big glass windows in one wall, and with its door open it was as sunny as the courtyard. A half dozen kids and three or four adults were at work on low tables, kneading a pure white dough that by its smell could not be bread. A man with black-rimmed spectacles and a salt-and-pepper beard looked up from a table where he was giving instructions to the workers, and walked over to us.
“Jennings, Lee,” he said, wiping his hands dry on a cloth tied around his waist. “What brings you out here today?”
“Douglas, this here is Tom Barnard, a… an elder of Onofre Valley, up the coast. We brought him down on the new tracks. Tom, this is Douglas Wentworth, San Diego’s bookmaker.”
“Bookmaker,” Tom repeated. He shook Wentworth’s hand. “I’m happy to meet a bookmaker, sir.”
“You take an interest in books?”
“I surely do. I was a lawyer once, and had to read the worst kind of books. Now I’m free to read what I like, when I can find it.”
“You have an extensive collection?” Wentworth asked, knocking his glasses up his nose with a finger to see Tom better.
“No sir. Fifty volumes or so, but I keep trading them with our neighbors for others.”
“Ah. And you, young man—do you read?” His eyes were the size of eggs behind his spectacles, and they held my gaze with ease.
“Yes, sir. Tom taught me how, and now that I can I enjoy it more than almost anything.”
Mr. Wentworth smiled briefly. “It’s refreshing to hear that San Onofre is a literate community. Perhaps you’d like to take a tour of our establishment? I can take a few moments from the work here, and we do have a modest printing arrangement that might be of interest.”
“We’d be delighted,” Tom said.
“Lee and I will go get some lunch,” Jennings said. “Back shortly.”
“We’ll wait for you,” Tom said. “Thanks for bringing us here.”
“Thank the Mayor.”
“Keep kneading until you get a perfect consistency,” Wentworth was saying to his students, “then begin to roll out the water. I’ll be back before the pressing.”
He led us to another room with good windows, one filled with small metal boxes set on tables. A woman was turning a handle on the side of one of these machines, rotating a drum on which a piece of print-covered paper was clamped. More pages covered by print were ejected from the bottom of the box.
“Mimeograph!” Tom cried.
The woman working the machine jerked at Tom’s shout, and glared at him.
“Indeed,” said Wentworth. “We are a modest operation, as I said. Mimeographing is our principal form of printing here. Not the most elegant method, or the most long lasting, but the machines are reliable, and besides, they’re about all we’ve got.”
“I think it’s beautiful,” Tom said, taking up a page to read it.
“It suffices.”
“Pretty color ink, too,” I put in; the ink was a bluish purple, and the page was thick with it.
Wentworth let out a short, sharp laugh. “Ha! Do you think so? I would prefer black, myself, but we must work with what we have. Now over here is our true pride. A hand letter press.” He gestured at a contraption of bars holding a big screw, which took up most of the far wall.
“Is that what that is,” Tom said. “I’ve never seen one.”
“This is what we do our fine work on. But there isn’t enough paper, and none of us knew, at first, how to set type. So it goes very slowly. We have had some successes, however. Following Gutenburg, here is our first one.” He hauled a big leather-bound book off the shelf beside the machine. “King James version, of course, although if I could have found a Jerusalem, it would have been a difficult choice.”
“Wonderful!” Tom said, taking the book. “I mean—” He shook his head, and I laughed to see him at a loss for words at last—it took a pile of words to do it. “That’s a lot of typesetting.”
“Ha!” Wentworth took the book back from Tom. “Indeed. And all for the sake of a book we already have. That’s not really the point, is it.”
“You print new books?”
“That occupies at least half our time, and is the part I’m most interested in, I confess. We publish instruction manuals, almanacs, travel journals, reminiscences…” He looked at Tom, his eyeballs swimming in the glass of his spectacles. “As a matter of fact, we invite all survivors of the war to write their story down and submit it to us. We’re almost certain to print it up. As our contribution to historical record.”