But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning.
I know a few good things about fires. California's coast knows them even better, secrets no living thing can fathom, forming in the smoke you breathed in too when the particles found their homes in our bodies' rooms.
I know one good thing is Echoes by Pink Floyd, and Dillon's mass of two foot long curls lolling down in the seat before me when Ethan starts taking the turns too hard and I yell something like "fuck dude slow down." He does so, laughs and we just go along until the song ends and the spell is broken by the smell of burning grasslands.
Tonight we got fed up with sitting in Ethan's garage and aborted the plan of marathoning Seinfeld until our eyes and lungs were sore. I suggested we should go hunt down the White Fire, which was burning in the hills above Santa Barbara, as I had done earlier in the day, but the roads had been blocked in an attempt to keep the adolescents from flooding in with their cameras and indignation.
We decided instead to drive north, chasing some metaphorical flame in place of the real ones, hoping to smoke out the livelihood that had retreated into abscesses of some great abandoned estate we bartered in exchange for our youth.
We reached Pismo and drove down to the wharf then parked, momentarily, before spotting three cops and turning straight around back up the way we came. Unfortunately, it was a one-way street and soon there were blue and red flashes in the rear window,"Ah, shit" all around. At first my heart pounded so that I could hear the blood sloshing through in thick glutinous pumps. Then reason kicked in and we composed ourselves to behave like the upstanding young folks we were (or hoped we were, or in some ways were not).
"Are you students?"
"I need to see your IDs."
He took a full 9 minutes to look over everything while we sat and laughed and chatted in the car, more than we'd spoken on the whole ride over.
The cop returned, gave us back our things and asked what the hell we were doing in Pismo anyway.
I said, "Our town is so boring, the only thing we can do is escape it."
"So you chose to drive from one large boring beach town to a smaller even more dull beach town?" He said.
"Yeah I guess," nervous laughter all around."Alright you kids get on your way then. Goodnight."
Pulling away from the flashing lights everyone was re-learning how to breathe and Dillon took ages to put on some music so we sat with our adrenaline in silence.
That's enough adventure for the night. Dillon cracked the window, lit a cigarette, and Ethan got on the highway while I wrote this all the way back to Santa Barbara's burning hips.
The White Fire started at 2:30 p.m. today and reached 1,000 acres by nightfall, born to carelessness and the Santa Ana's, blowing in hot from the south. The wind was so strong that planes were grounded within the first hour while flames jumped across mountain ridges and 3,000 people packed away their summarized lives into cars.
I went to see it, earlier today, before all this nonsense happened. I've always had a fascination with fires. Once when I was young, my parents drove me down the bluffs in the backseat of my father's tar black sports car and my mom thought we should bring soda and snacks to the firefighters so we did and she laughed with them while I stood and watched the flames.
Fires remind me of you and you remind me that I don't think I like being reminded of you anymore. But I do like fires, their brevity, and destruction. The closest I've ever been able to describe the curtain of loneliness that swallows me still is in a burned orchard I once saw as a child.
I'm standing in it now, right in the middle, surrounded by bleached ephemeral figures. The ghosts of trees look beautiful in their frozen screams, rising like tombstones from the dirt.
It's a bit frightening, but not nearly so much as the abandoned suburbs near the nuclear plant in the valley at night. When we drive by it, Dillon says his dad thinks squatters live there, cookie cutter houses leaking sewage and poor life choices at the seams. I imagine them and their charade of normalcy and realize it's not so different from the inhabitants before. Anyone can hide their corpses behind a job or a house or a car but they all start reeking with the passage of time.
No comments:
Post a Comment