by Matt Weiland
The Lodge, you may be assured, is guaranteed historic by its own sign, and within the room, in a band around the walls, one finds the epitome of vulgar American gentility: a shelf of classics, with globes and model sailboats tucked in; and because the management, or their decorators, or more likely the company that the decorators went to, trusted that none of us looks closely, much less reads, it turns out that there are only a dozen titles: The Iliad, Oliver Twist, War and Peace, etcetera, which, like that globe and model sailboat, simply repeat, round and round, with real doors and windows cut out of them—American, I said, not merely Californian; for in spite of her faux Spanish roofs, California retains her mania for newness, which requires unhypocritical obliteration.
Above Sonora, Highway 109 arrives in high pine forest, supplying such metropoli as Confidence (population 50), then Sugar Pine (150 souls), not to mention Mi-Wuk Village, the town I went to see in hopes of discovering a plaque, a museum of Indian artifacts, or some assertion of California history. I bought a bag of ice at the steep-roofed Mi-Wuk Market, which also sold chains for various makes of cars. The clerk said two dollars and seventy-five cents. I asked him where the hiking was, and he said to go to Pinecrest Lake, not here. I asked him whether this had been a Miwok settlement, and he said that he guessed it had been. I asked whether he knew what had happened to the Miwoks, and he said that he did not. (“I think that some developer named the town,” explained the park ranger up the road. “I don’t know. All the streets have Indian names. There’s really not much around here.”)—And so I rolled on out of Mi-Wuk Village, which had the usual Sierra look: a trifle gloomy, with a scattering of prefabricated edifices on either side of the highway, then pines behind and around, casting everything into dark monotony.
Not far below Sonora lies Jamestown’s lovely white church with its boarded-up windows, a yellow-grassed bluff and blue sky behind; then there are bulls and cows on a green field, and still more cattle beneath a tree on a yellow field; next comes Chinese Camp, whose rock-knives and live oaks rise out of the hot blond grass, and this town is far smaller than Mi-Wuk Village. In the grocery-tavern where one can buy bad replicas of Indian moccasins for a nice cheap price, there is a man who wears camouflage fatigues and who speaks in what I take to be an Australian accent. I asked him if any of the five thousand Chinese who founded the town had stayed, and he replied that they had not—because it was a camp, see. He said that it had been unsafe to be a non-Caucasian gold miner in those nineteenth-century days, so when the construction of the transcontinental railroad offered them a chance to escape the vigilantes and make a fixed wage, the Chinese all packed up. This was something like the tale of Sonora, whose Mexican miners had been run out after the Americans assessed them a special tax, then marched on their camp, bearing guns and flags. I asked the man in camouflage whether he had found any Chinese artifacts, and he replied that he had discovered opium pipes, opium bottles, and marbles made of grayish clay.
A trifle farther down, just past the gated homes of Copper Hills, you will find Copperopolis, which once upon a time was the West’s principal source of, yes, copper. An ancient A-frame structure, which must have been a works of some kind, broods over a hillock of broken rocks streaked blue and green. A rusty cylinder with a pointed top lies a few steps away. It resembles the tip of a giant’s pencil; I could have hidden half my body inside. At the base of the hill, a live oak grows out of a roofless stone room. And now I am already back on the main road, where the two-story Old Corner Saloon wears its own helpfully “historic” sign: The upper floor was once a whorehouse.
And then one rides down Highway 4, out of Copperopolis and down through wet olive grass under the cloudy sky until a more beautiful view of the Central Valley than I could ever have imagined appears below me: a vast, reddish-orange flatness, with shadows and trees, and gulleyed a little, like the plains of Wyoming. Here comes the town of Farmington, where inside Lagorio’s Grill & Bar some women were laughing and some men in biker T-shirts were drinking cheap beer, and since my sweetheart wanted something nonalcoholic to drink, I stood up at the bar with her and waited until it was our turn and then we waited some more because we were not regulars. When the barmaid came, I said to my sweetheart: “I wonder if they have orange juice,” to which the barmaid replied: “While you’re wondering, I’ll go serve some customers.”
Two men were drinking beer. The closest one said that he and his friend were voyaging from bar to bar. Perhaps because it was noon on a Saturday, they were still sitting up straight; they were not yet drooping like the leaves of a walnut tree. Somebody ordered a hamburger with American cheese, and the closest man said: “What other kind of cheese is there? Don’t give me that wetback cheese!”
His friend said to the barmaid: “I’ll have a burger. You’ll be the bun.” And the regulars went on with their steely bantering happiness, while a family sat eating burgers and a young boy in a hooded sweatshirt wandered through the darkness; and when the barmaid brought our lunch she called me honey.
Mr. Sean Wilsey, who commissioned this essay, expressed concern that I might not have sufficiently emphasized (a) the positive and (b) the Pacific Coast, so I humbly requested some expense money and set off to re-admire one of my favorite places, the Point Reyes National Seashore, which frequently wins that pleasant cliché pristine. Unfortunately, just then a freighter bumped into the Bay Bridge, and out came 58,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil. Four days later, black clots had already begun to wash up at Point Reyes. “On the surface, it would appear that we did everything by the book in this case as far as responding,” said Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen, thereby informing me that everything was A-OK. A week after the accident, I set off to inspect that surface, motoring along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, and meeting congregations of redwoods along the way. “I love these tunnels of trees,” said my sweetheart; for it was so shady and sweet with the foliage down by the river, with the cedar smell and the ferns; then we ducked back into the gray-green dry country. There was a shaggy yellow-orange willow in Olema, after which we achieved the slightly grander metropolis of Point Reyes Station, where California struts her stuff for tourist money; the handwoven scarves have been helpfully tagged “wearable art,” and you can look through the big window at the Cowgirl Creamery to see people kneading the curds of their artisanal cheese. After lunching at an organic diner, we passed a dried-out marsh on Highway 1, then came out into the Point Reyes National Seashore, whose scent of fog, trees, and dirt differed strikingly from the mountain smell around Sonora. The air cooled. Walking through the Bishop pines, which grow nowhere except along the coasts of California and Mexico, we touched a bush with white feather-seeds like dandelions. Some three-leafed brambles had gone whimsically crimson. Ahead lay the Pacific like a hardening of the sky. The white sun rested on that blue sea far down below the piney raspberry hills.
At first, Limantour Beach seemed the same as ever, but, as in that creepy science-fiction classic On the Beach, not everything was right. Beside a shining piece of kelp lay a black blob of something the size of my forefinger, something that smelled like asphalt and was sickeningly soft. A few paces beyond, a clump of kelp looked burned; actually its tentacles were black with oil. The shore was marked by translucent dead jellyfish every fifty or a hundred yards. For some reason the flies disdained them in favor of the oiled black kelp, which seemed disgustingly hairy, like a magnified insect leg. Now here lay a blob as large as three fingers.
Sometimes the blobs were strangely attractive, as when they resembled obsidian; and I remember a lovely, gleaming-black ribbon of kelp. Then came a mat of black kelp like a bird’s nest, and more dead jellyfish. Sometimes a blob might be the size of a luxury steak, black and sticky; then it was usually an oiled dead jellyfish. Dig into it with a stick, and the tissue separated. But these manifestations, though ubiquitous, were not densely arrayed; and they occurred in conjunction with the Dutch blue sky and the dunes with the yellow-green grass.
A single sea bird, black w
ith oil, skittered and dove. The other birds appeared untouched. Soon my sweetheart and I had black fingers from holding hands.
We looked out, as most human beings do, looking out, as we all do, at the horizon. Then we drove back to Olema, passing through stands of Bishop pines, where the late afternoon was tinged as if with sea light.
The next morning, parting from the fat sticky evergreen cones of Olema, we headed in the direction of Stinson Beach, and the highway wound in and out of what could have been Sonora foothills. Then that signature California landscape gave way to another: green darkness decorated by the pale vertical stripes of eucalyptus trunks.
The low flat blueness of Bolinas Lagoon smelled of mud and salt. A white heron stood ankle-deep in the water, very still, with its beak out, and the shadow beneath it resembled a gravestone. Shimmering stripes of blue and brown bedecked the water, and the horizon was a line of trees protruding from a cloud bank. Wandering through the green reeds, I could discover no petroleum spoor. Waterfowl squeaked overhead in flocks. White ducks floated on the trembling water, occupying both sides of the boundary between blank blueness and reflected trees. My sweetheart showed me a tree-hive she had found the last time she was there. Even this late in the season, a few bees were humming in and out. We came to another place where the ducks were as thick as pebbles. An egret waded with large yet deliberate steps, its head seeming all the tinier atop its long, long neck. I took out my pocketknife and slit open one of the jade green stalks of fennel and rubbed it on my face before giving my sweetheart a surprise kiss. Then as we approached that flotilla of ducks we began to find big black globs of oil on the grass. So we left that place, passing a great blue heron that stood at the edge of a grass-island, staring down into a channel, no doubt watching for lunch. Passing a concretion called Seadrift, whose ugly edifices were partially redeemed by bamboo and passionflower behind some of its fences, we drove through Stinson Beach and then followed the highway up the steep dry grass-hills at the edge of the Pacific.
Before long we were in Sausalito, a tourist trap possessed of the same superficial pleasantness as Carmel: art galleries, restaurants, and shops that sold those expensively conformist items which one buys not for oneself but to fulfill some dreary gift-giving obligation. To remind me that this was California, a façade informed me of the existence of a NUTRITIONIST STRUCTURAL integrationist CRANIOPATH, and then another building announced itself as MySpaEvent.com. I always enjoy Sausalito regardless, because it commands such a fine view of the Bay, with Angel Island not more than a mile or two across the water, and the Berkeley hills shining blue-green beyond the Bay Bridge, and Alcatraz resembling a white neoclassical city from this angle, and, best of all, my favorite city, San Francisco, which was a platter of porcelain cups, pitchers, and saltshakers upon a tray of fog. Speaking of which, it was past noon, and there was a restaurant where I sometimes liked to watch San Francisco over a salad or a Bloody Mary. So we sat on the deck with the Bay so warm blue and ripply. My sweetheart decided that she could probably swim as far as Angel Island. And a blond California girl in a sundress sat beside her boyfriend, gazing at the bobbing boats. As we ate our lunch the fog slipped across San Francisco until only the tip of the Transamerica Pyramid was left. Then the city was utterly gone; and by the time we got our dessert it had come back again. Our waiter remarked that he could no longer walk his dog in the park at Point Isabel over in Richmond, because the beach there was so slicked over that the authorities had closed it. Indeed, after lunch we strolled along the sea-edge and found black globs on this or that rock. A warning notice from the Audubon Society advised us to leave contaminated birds alone, and to avoid stepping in the oil and thereby spreading it. So we drove out of Sausalito, and paid our five-dollar toll to cross the Golden Gate Bridge, whose pillars faded off into the fog, and an ovoid blur of the Presidio peering out at us from a mousehole of clear air. Then we were in San Francisco.
San Francisco is my favorite American city, in part because it houses multitudes of secret worlds; and so, solely to please Mr. Wilsey, and certainly not out of any proclivities of my own, I put on my lipstick and earrings, while my sweetheart, who now stood nude in the lovely wig I had bought her, told me to close my eyes until she was ready to surprise me with her new outfit, a dominatrix costume. You see, we were off to spend more expense money at a certain S&M club and dungeon whose workshop that night addressed a question of considerable interest to any loving couple: What are the most effective ways to inflict fear and spicy physical stimulation upon a submissive, employing hot and sharp objects as needed? The truth is that I will always remain proud to be a Californian. I have the right to act in any consensual way that I choose; so does anyone else. In Sacramento, I might go duck hunting; in the Sierras, I could hike on my own terms; so, in San Francisco, I watched the nude submissive getting taped and lashed to the padded table, with an absorbent gauze pad beneath her buttocks and a mask over her face. Submissives, by the way, are also called bottoms, and dominants are tops. This bottom’s top was not her lover, they told us later, but someone with whom she liked to play these extreme games, sometimes for four or five hours at a time. The top, a middle-aged woman in camouflage pants, pegged out the bottom’s labia and nailed them into the table. She began sharpening a knife. Then she began to demand, interrogate, threaten. She made the bottom hold a little bell in her left hand. I knew that that was the safety device: If the bottom were to shake it or drop it, then it would ring and the session would stop.
What happened next—the breast-slapping, the playing with the chopped liver, the forced pistol-sucking, the hammering all around her, the screaming—was slightly horrifying to me at first; and every now and then the top would do something between the other woman’s legs so that her mouth would open and she would loudly moan. On a folding chair not far from me sat a beautiful black dominant with long blond hair. Her submissive was a dreamy white boy with glasses who sat on the floor just in front of her, with his head against her knees. At the scariest parts she caressed his head a little absently. Near them sat two gray-haired, Rubenesque women, one of whom watched the performance smiling, with her head on the other’s shoulder.
“I want to see some blood,” the top was saying, and she stabbed any number of syringes into the bottom’s breasts, leaving them in so that she could laughingly twang them back and forth. The bottom moaned. The room stank of sweat. Now the top was tenderly kneading her breast, all the while shocking her with an electric wand; wherever she directed the spark, she had deposited a piece of flash cotton, which instantly flamed, then went out. Much of what she was doing to the bottom was mental; the bottom later said that she believed she was getting pierced at those moments, when actually not any mark was left.
“Oh, you’re bleeding real nice!” the top said. Chuckling, she imitated her submissive’s moans. The audience smiled happily. Then at last she was doing something between the bottom’s legs, something that must have been very painful since the woman was screaming, arching her back and contorting her face like a mother in labor; finally her head rose up from the table—and when it was all over I learned from her that I had not at all understood what I had been looking at, that she had been climaxing then and evidently had climaxed on at least one of the earlier occasions when I had thought her to be in physical agony. After she was unmasked and untied, she stood up smiling. The top gave her a gift-wrapped present, and then the two women kissed each other on the lips. They spoke to us about each other with affection, gratitude, and respect. They wanted to know what the audience thought, and smiled when the audience said that they were hot. That was another time that I felt thankful to be a Californian, which is to say a believer in the right of any adult to act upon her preferences beyond the point of extremity as long as whatever she does remains consensual.
San Francisco, like other American cities, utilizes various invisibles—for instance, the Salvadoran day laborer Alex, who for ten dollars spoke to me in a mixture of English and Spanish, the latter translated b
y my sweetheart. I asked him how his life was here, and he said: “Very difficult, especially in the winter. It’s very cold; there’s little work. You can go all day without getting any work. Sometimes you go four or five days without any work.”
“How much do you need each day to pay your living expenses?”
“Maybe 100,” he said, and when he broke down his costs I learned that his calculations, like those of so many poor people, did not add up, for he said: “I pay $450 a month in rent, twenty a day for food. Sometimes I eat some hamburger, fast food. I have no cooking facilities. For transportation sometimes somebody give me a ride. For bus, fifty cents.”
He had six siblings—“Just one with my mother and five with my father.” His daughter was in El Salvador and his wife in Pennsylvania. “Wife” was the word he used, but later he said: “My daughter’s mother, I don’t consider her my wife.”
He said that he had crossed the border legally, which may or may not have been true. I asked what it was like for those who crossed illegally, and he said: “Some people think of it as an adventure but they put their lives in danger because there’s delinquency in the borders of both countries, so people lose their lives or get assaulted. I have a lot of friends who have had to beg to get food at the border.”
“How well do the people from El Salvador and the people from Mexico get along?”
“There’s quite a bit of conflict at this corner. Some people get more work and some people get less work. The depression of not getting work makes them hate the people who do get it. Sometimes people come to blows. It’s a difference between the countries. In general, my friends who are from El Salvador speak better English and have better transportation. So they come across better with employers.”