Big Dreams (70 page)

At about five o’clock, the phone rang at our house. I chatted for a while with a neighbor down the block, filling her in on my travels and telling her that I was still restless and hadn’t yet been able to settle down. She interrupted me quite suddenly to exclaim, “Oh, my! I believe we’re having an earthquake!”

I felt nothing at first, but I could hear the distant tinkling of glassware, and then, all at once, the hardwood floor began to shift from side to side beneath my feet in a giant, rolling motion, like the deck of a boat in a rough sea.

Our hill seemed to be liquefying, turning to Jell-O. There were sounds of plaster ripping and joists creaking—cries of pain on the part of an old house as its brittle bones got rearranged. I watched in
awe as a filigree of fine cracks appeared on the living room walls and ceiling.

The rolling motion subsided in about a minute, only to be followed by several sharp aftershocks, hard little jolts that were akin to the pinpoint jabs that a good boxer throws to keep an opponent off-balance. My wife, who’d been taking a nap, emerged from the bedroom, and together, still jumpy, we inspected the house and found that we had been lucky. The only damage that we’d suffered was some broken plates.

A few minutes later, a friend arrived in a trembly condition. He’d been driving to our place, idly thinking about the ball game, when the earthquake hit and the road before him started buckling and rippling, folding in on itself. He had never seen anything like it, he said. Craters were opening in front of him, and he had to swerve to avoid them and also the other swerving drivers.

We sat outside on the front steps. I could feel my heartbeat returning to normal, and I had a sense, too, of collecting a self that had been dislodged and shattered into fragments. The fragments had flown randomly into the air and were now being reintegrated into my system—a picture curiously celestial, like one of exploding galaxies.

It was oddly calm and pleasant outside. There was no electricity, the telephone lines were down, and the cars were few and far between. Evening was coming on, and candles burned in windows against a dusky, blue sky. We were seeing the city as it must have looked more than a century ago, at a time when the wheels of existence turned more slowly. The many hills were cupped in a pastoral silence.

We had the contentment of survivors, but our feelings changed when we dug up some batteries for a radio and listened to the early news reports from around the Bay Area—the ball game canceled, houses falling down, freeway ramps collapsing, and sporadic incidents of looting. We learned that people had died. Scientists had measured the earthquake at 7.1 on the Richter scale, a magnitude of shaking that none of us had ever experienced before.

The bulletins were like dispatches from a battlefront in a war that was not ours. Except for the power outages, Noe Valley was relatively unaffected. We went about cooking dinner in an alternating mood of hilarity and gloom, switching the radio to a call-in show where sundry “eyewitnesses” were supplying the testimony to prove that the earthquake was both a collective and an individual phenomenon, rattling each private universe to a greater or a lesser degree.

After dark, my brother showed up at the front door with his wife and his daughter. He was carrying a bottle of red wine and two cans of Dinty Moore beef stew, the only canned food that he could find on the ravaged shelves of his corner grocery. His family had the dour look of the dispossessed. They had just moved into a new condo across town, and their fireplace chimney had come unmortared and had crashed through a window. Their plaster had not just cracked. It had ripped free in chunks to reveal the lath behind it.

They were afraid that if a particularly strong aftershock were to strike, the entire structure might tumble down and kill them in their sleep, so we set them up in the spare bedroom, fed them, and uncorked the wine. The night was taking on a festive, end-of-the-world edge.

In the morning, with the electricity back and the telephone lines repaired, we could almost pretend that the earthquake hadn’t happened, but scenes of destruction had been playing on TV across the nation, and we had to field a succession of calls from worried relatives and friends. Once again, California was being portrayed in the media as a danger zone, even a mortal threat, where the chance of striking it rich was equalized by the chance that a catastrophe would wipe you out.

I could hear the admonitions echoing in Oneida, in Orlando, and in Pittsburgh.
You see, Charlie? Aren’t you glad you didn’t move out there?
The fundamentalists had probably concluded that we were being punished for our sins.

The calls were a comfort to us, anyway. They reestablished connections. The desire to be connected to someone,
anyone
, was overwhelming after the earthquake and clearly evident in our neighborhood,
where there were twice as many people on the streets. If you’d got caught alone, the trauma had reinforced your loneliness, and you didn’t want to experience that again.

In a few days, when the emergency measures were lifted, I visited the Marina District, where the devastation had been the most severe. Many plate-glass windows on Chestnut Street were splintered or demolished, and the pavement was riddled with small tears. Driveways had split in two, as though a huge ax had cleaved them, and curbs had torn away from sidewalks. Bricks lay everywhere in heaps.

Entire blocks were cordoned off in the Marina. Looking down one, I saw a row of about twenty apartment buildings that were drifting away from plumb, tilting forward and backward like a bunch of tipsy men in a lineup. On the Marina Green, a grassy park along the bay, army tents were bivouacked. Some of the grand houses with water views were deserted, all the furniture gone from inside them, as if thieves had run off with it.

Elsewhere, young renters were loading chairs and beds into a van. They were fleeing from San Francisco before the next calamity hit, surrendering their identity as Californians and hoping to turn themselves back into blameless Iowans or Pennsylvanians before it was too late.

The quiet in the marina was exceptional. It resembled the hush that you encounter among the faithful during a church service. The earthquake had made everything solid seem watery. It had drawn into question the very stability of our so-called terra firma. For a single minute, we’d been liberated from our orderly illusions and subjected to the chaotic laws of nature, our lives tossed into the sky, and a new set of transformations was beginning.

A
N EARTHQUAKE SHAKES THINGS LOOSE
. At my house, the stalemate got worse, not better, and soon I had moved into a furnished apartment
by myself and had reluctantly acquired two more badges of a Californian, a therapist and a legal separation.

I say that flatly now, but then I was sick at heart. I cursed and railed and kicked at any handy object, wandering around in the evenings and looking for solace in useless bars from which every stitch of solace had vanished long ago. I felt as though I had joined a fallen world and was now obliged to hear the confessions of friends and acquaintances who were newly eager to share with me the details of their own season of pain.

Mostly, though, I was sad, deathly sad. Love is as scarce in California as it is everywhere else, and to have forfeited a portion of any that might have accrued was a tragedy.

The therapist, a Jungian, understood my blues. The soul, he said, rose up in middle age and tried to throw off its shackles, even if the shackles were self-imposed. The soul had its own irrepressible urges, and that could lead to unacceptable emotions that were in conflict with the feelings that you were supposed to have—wise, good feelings—and ultimately to despair.

In time, my wife and I spruced up our house and put it on the market. It sold on the very day that it was listed, an April Fool’s Day, for double the money that we’d paid for it. In our seven years of tenancy, we had struck it rich backhandedly, losing in the process something far more precious to us.

For months, I walked around with my pockets full of greenbacks, crying, “I’ll never buy another house! I’ll be a renter forever!,” until my potential tax liability sank in, and I began a hasty search for property. I thought that I would head for the country again, no doubt stirred by my memories of Alexander Valley, but I was on my own now and decided against the isolation. My head was still spinning, and my heart was still in shreds.

So, by chance, as a compromise, I wound up in the paradise of Marin County, buying a little, shingled cottage on a private tree-shaded lot in a small town. A young couple had built the cottage in
1906, to get away from San Francisco after the great earthquake and fire. Thick redwood timbers anchored it to an unbudgeable foundation, but I didn’t become aware of the aptness of my choice until I signed the closing papers.

I slept badly during my first weeks in the cottage, waking to the scurrying noises of animals, coons and skunks and possums on the prowl. I put in some tomatoes where the daisies used to grow and mulched them heavily against a trip to Real Foods, but some deer slipped through an open gate one night and ate the plants.

Winter came. There was a good old boy in San Rafael who chopped down sickly or unwanted trees and sold them off as firewood, so I stacked my porch with oak and eucalyptus logs and burned fires right through to March. Ashes drifted across the mantelpiece, and I would dampen a rag to wipe them from the books and the framed photos of my niece, our family’s first-born Californian, blond and blue-eyed Nora, a girl of the Golden West.

A
NOTHER SPRING
, and I laced on my boots and hiked around Mount Tamalpais, up over the trails by Phoenix Lake feeling the pull on leg muscles gone soft in winter and feeling, too, the strong beating of my blood. The mountain was alive with water, every creek and rill flowing, and again there was the seasonal gift of wildflowers, something so simple and elegant and yet so easily missed.

Often as I hiked I thought about all that I’d seen on my journey and about the future in California and what it would bring to my niece. The problems in the state were immense but not unsolvable, although the solutions might require a fundamental change in the human heart. I looked at the tall trees and the birds and passed blacktail deer and once a little red fox, hoping that some of what I loved about California, its fast-fading natural bounty, could still be preserved for her.

I sensed a fear upon land. As our resources became smaller, Californians were reaching and grabbing for what they could get,
damning the consequences. Sometimes I pictured a future California where there were places as impoverished as the
colonias
in Tijuana, where the schools were even shabbier and all pretense of democratic caring had fallen by the boards. At other times, in a better mood, I believed that we might yet learn from our errors and begin assembling a vital, dynamic community whose potential was unlimited.

All the reimaginings and the reformulations, the infinite attempts at transformation, they were the psychic capital of California. As my accuser in Buttonwillow had known, we were all fly-by-nighters in the end, making ourselves up as we went along, simultaneously tolerant and intolerant of our mutual acts of self-invention.

Among certain Indian tribes in California, it used to happen that a man might rise up without a word and go off to wander for a while in the world, not knowing what he was looking for, or maybe not looking for anything in particular. Nobody could predict whether or not the man would return, or what he would have to say if he did return.

In many respects, I felt like such a man—somebody who had wandered in the world—and what I brought back with me from my grand tour of California were the most basic of truths, things so elementary that to utter them in public was to risk being handed a cap and bells. Love the earth, I would say. Find the beauty and protect it. Care for the sick and the outcast. Build schools to teach your children. Be gentle. Dream.

The essential map of the territory is James D. Hart’s
A Companion to California
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), an indispensable guide that I relied on frequently to point me in the right direction. My primary source for historical background was David Lavender’s
California: Land of New Beginnings
(New York: Harper & Row, 1972), although I consulted many other histories as well, such as the work of Kevin Starr. I was on the road from April to October of 1989, but I continued to follow the stories recounted herein after I got home and updated the figures cited in them whenever possible.

My main source for such data was
California Statistical Abstract
, which is published by the state’s Department of Finance. The median prices quoted for homes come from
California Cities, Towns, and Counties
(Palo Alto, CA: Information Publications, 1993).

For my assessment of the lives of certain prominent Californians past and present, I was fortunate to have at hand several books whose authors had preceded me and had done a fine job of research and interpretation. Anyone interested in a fuller treatment of the various subjects could study them profitably.