Big Green Country
A Novel
Frances Rivetti
Copyright © 2019 Frances Rivetti
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, names, incidents and places are products of the author’s imagination, or used in a fictional manner and are not to be interpreted as real. For permission to reproduce or transmit any section or images from this book other than in the form of a brief excerpt for review purposes, contact the author via website contact form at francesrivetti.com.
ISBN 978-0-9904921-2-2
Author photo by Dominic Rivetti
Book design by ebooklaunch.com
This book is for my sisters, Kerry and Lindsey and my brother, Stuart
Contents
Epigraph Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
“Family, like branches on a tree, we all grow in different directions, yet our roots remain as one”
— unknown.
Maggie
At first sight, the ranch appeared deserted. In drawing closer, an amber porch light glowed in the blue funk of the afternoon gloom, a suggestion that Bridget, my sister, or someone at least, was home. It was February and not yet the tail end of another interminably long, wet winter, especially for the renegades, the social outcasts, the misfits among us who live on the coastal edge.
As the last of the endangered species of my family’s weathered, salt-water tribe, Bridget, her daughter, Mia and me, we were hardly what you’d call tight, despite our limited ranks. My sister always said I would wash up again one day, like a sleeper wave sneaking up on these wild, uncivilized shores. And, as a special reward for her patience, now here I was, as predicted, belly up, gasping for breath. How well I’d marked her words with a spectacular series of personal failures that led to her prophecy of my return.
I readied myself for the look, the smug and judging silent sting she’d had about her since we were kids. It was Bridget’s way of warning me against my tendency toward lofty aspirations, the dangers of rising above my station in the order of mediocre, the mantra of the McCleery lot. Maybe, I hoped, my sister had grown a little kinder with time when it came to tolerating my airs and graces; more forgiving, somehow. In my defense, all I really had in mind that dreary afternoon was a low-key reentry, no drama, to simply be a part of it all, like I’d never left.
I would not have come anywhere near the place but for the fact that my bright, shiny life, one that had been so far removed from this mud-splattered expanse had unceremoniously imploded into a million toxic components of its own. I was trespassing on hostile territory, this desolate place with its miserable winter microclimate I’d fought so long to ditch.
It was hardly a death sentence, I consoled myself — my coming back — merely proof that, after all, I am who I am and who I’ve always been. Ranch-born and raised. That and the fact that the grandiose city apartment I could no longer afford was gone, along with more or less everything else I possessed. That same morning I’d cut all but one of a slew of credit cards into a pile of small, ragged, triangular shards that I subsequently distributed out of habit into four different trash bags. Oh, what pure, unadulterated glee I’d experienced in the previous day’s act of stripping my closet of its shameless jumble of casual luxury brands, the swearing of an end to the corporate ethos, my former existence.
I’d pulled the plug on the last of my shallow connections. My plan was to spend what was left of the wet winter months curled up in a blanket, licking my wounds, lounging away the last of the season’s short, dark, damp and dreary days on my sister’s sad excuse of a couch. The volume of internal toxicity that built up in my last months in San Francisco had proved a ticking time bomb. And there was only ever one direction this was bound for — upward in a painful and messy explosion of my letting go. Anxiety and mood swings further fueled my long-winded, overdue metamorphosis. It wasn’t pretty and if I’ve learned anything over the past few months, it’s that it’s best to embrace failure, call it out, move on and start showing up sooner rather than later in the next chapter and one of your own design. There are no prizes for champions in procrastination and self-pity.
The stormy weather pattern made its appearance in early fall. By February, continuing heavy rainfall slammed the Bay Area and beyond. October’s lumbering first drops that had escalated into a seemingly endless downpour, served to wash away what little was left of my grip on reality, the false world of the same tech titan I’d so desperately clung to for fifteen ridiculously long years. A barrage of winter storms battered the saturated coastline from central California and up to the Oregon border as I’d panicked, then reconciled and later, felt strangely soothed by my wasteful and contorted past steadily siphoning itself down the drain.
An irritatingly chirpy Bay Area news meteorologist in her slim, figure-hugging, cool-hued rotation of the same form-fitting dress, nightly hailed it a rare, one-hundredyear winter, with downpours intense and unforgiving, entire coastal communities being cut off for days, weeks at a time. Big Sur, to the south, for one, was sealed off for several months by mudslides that submerged the shoreline highway in and out.
That afternoon’s rain-slicked return plays on in my mind — an intense and primitive tableau of densely painted scenes, made all the more dramatic by my indulgent sense of personal doom. It was in fact, a perfect prelude, a portent of more violent things to come. Earlier, as I was waiting on the shiny city sidewalk for my ride out of the city, I recall being struck by the sight of a small bird emerging from its narrow shelter, a crack in the siding of my closed-up apartment building. I’d watched, mesmerized, as the little feathered creature flew to the top of a metal stop sign, narrowly missing her wings being clipped by an electric Muni trolley bus powered by a set of potentially lethal overhead wires. I tracked the bird’s flight path back to the crevice behind the one dry spot on the sidewalk where I’d positioned my bags. Slowly, so as not to startle her, I crouched down to take a closer look at her tiny nest. An open-beaked, fluffy-downed nestling huddled inside in hopeful anticipation of its mother’s haul. She, in turn, apologetically ruffled her baby’s whispery fluff and took off a second time in search of something, anything, even the smallest morsel, I guessed, to satisfy her duty, keep her promise. Bits of paper and plastic poked out of the nesting she’d constructed of dried grass and twigs. I still think of her and how resourceful and determined she’d been to survive the cold, hard city, to brave the perils of the sky above in placing her infant’s needs before her own.
I’d observed him with a similar degree of quiet fascination, my clean-cut and clueless, twenty-something Uber driver, as he took in the changing topography of our two-hour journey. Only sixty miles in distance yet light years apart from our primitive destination objective of coastal Point B. We headed north out of the city, matrix of my shame, over the rain-slick surface of the Golden Gate Bridge, through the Robin Williams Tunnel and into Marin County, silently weaving our way northwest, up and out toward the wide-open spaces of storm battered western Sonoma County. Red barns in open fields, black and white bovines heavy with milk, their lumbering bodies in vibrant contrast to the rolling green hills, the last of the proud herds of Holstein dairy cows bracing side by side in tight formation against the onslaught of
the constant rain.
I’d made it clear, for his sake more than mine, in giving him a fair and honest headsup of the formidable, potentially slippery territory ahead, a hard-going route along the Sonoma Coast during the rainy months, even for the most seasoned driver. If you’re unfamiliar with this remote and watery border of Northern California, then best take my word, for it’s a uniquely foreign, otherworldly place to all except the few of us who were born and raised out here. Geographic distance has little to do with it. No matter how close it looks on a map, reaching the more insular points of the western shoreline is to travel from one microcosm to another, one that exists in a kind of time bubble of its own. By the time we’d made it out to the coast, my unsuspecting agent of change had proved, as I feared he would, woefully inept at motoring this unsung stretch of shoreline, this wolfish terrain, the wild and familiar seascape of my formative years. Not that I was judging him too hard. It wasn’t like I had a choice and I really couldn’t afford to be picky.
After a while, a swift stab to the heart and there it was again, that old, cold, innate fear of having come too close to the steeper drops, the slicker edges of the coastline with its rows of craggy, wind-tormented Cypress trees masked by a thick, barely transparent cloak of briny, creeping fog. Thinking back, mostly, overwhelmingly so, it is the ever present, nostalgia-triggering, pervasive smell of decomposing grass that transports me back to that winter’s afternoon, that and my being engulfed by a second, overlaying odor of a strange and yet compelling blend of home, the salty Pacific mixed with the wet and ghostly aroma of once pervasive cow poop.
Great globs of Neptunian spittle ambushed my view as my eyes were fixed on our waterlogged route from a narrowly framed vantage point — the rain-drenched windshield of a stranger’s lemon-scented Honda Civic sedan. Fast flowing streaks of precipitation, a salty blend of tear-shaped raindrops hammered the windshield as we slowly inched our way northwest along the Pacific Ocean and up to the ranch. I couldn’t stop my mind from flashing back to the futuristic-looking cartoon-like self-driving cars being tested on the busy streets of San Francisco. I’m sorry, but not sorry in that I find it hard to imagine placing my trust in a supposedly obedient intelligent car ever fully safely delivering someone like me someplace like this and in such lousy conditions.
A greenish-brownish muddy squall was holding my very human driver and me captive under the glassed-in assault of a pair of angry windshield wipers that swung madly, back and forth. My gut still wrenches at the grim memory of having witnessed an innocent pedestrian, minding her own business, struck and killed by one of these selfdriving test cars in the drizzle of dusk, shortly before I left the city for good. I’ve tried and tried to block it out of my mind, but the image of the old woman who hit the windshield and was left like a jagged mannequin in the middle of the road, has taken up permanent residence in my head. There it remains as the ultimate risk of the dangers and risks of artificial intelligence. Humans are arrogant and we’ve gotten way too far ahead of ourselves. For all of the software, algorithms and radar, it turned out that neither the so-called smart car nor its emergency back up driver so much as saw her coming. I’d prefer to leave my chances to human error thank you very much.
I twisted one of a pair of sizable diamond studs around in my right earlobe. I’d worn these coveted studs consistently since my splurge with a portion of my stock option cashout, days before Andres talked me into the doomed investment we’d made together. Most startups fail, I’d known that, which makes it all the worse. I rotated its thin, platinum edge around and around with my finger and thumb, mindful not to loosen the clasp. Oh how fast we had trailed back into corporate servitude, Andres and me, our tails firmly between our legs, back to where we started, shamefaced and lightened of the substantial load we should have put into a property in the City if we’d had half a brain between us.
A defect in the rideshare vehicle’s internal fan caused it to rattle and clank. It spluttered and struggled in its vain attempt to combat the constant spew of hot air that heaved out of the dashboard vents. Still, we’d pressed on due north along a thick smudge of craggy, water-washed coast, aquaplaning three or four times as small streams pushed over their banks, the two of us encased in condensation and the cloying aroma of a heavy lavender-scented laundry detergent. I’d kept my mouth firmly shut as he gripped the steering wheel with tense, white, knuckles, willing, I assumed, his own safe navigation clear of this strange and storm-lashed, oceanic outer realm of the greater Bay Area.
“What do you think of the new self-driving cars?” I asked, unable to keep silent any longer as I made a futile attempt to shake off the disturbing image of the old woman’s demise. “How soon do you suppose they will they put hard working people like you out of business?”
“Faster than most folk realize,” he replied. “It’s an interesting advancement for science, for sure, though personally, I have plenty of concerns aside from the mechanics.”
His accent was unidentifiable, though his English was good, an intermixing of street words with grammar that was better than a lot of kids I’d grown up with.
“Seriously,” I said. “It’s all about ethics if you ask me. You know, the big questions, such as if you were faced this afternoon with the option of hitting a full-grown stag out here in the middle of the coastal road, or swerving and running the very real risk of going over the edge? If I’d asked a self-driving car to get me here as fast as possible, I’d most certainly have thrown up all over the dashboard by now.”
The leaden heavens dumped on the black and roiling frigid waters of the Pacific. He drove on, dodging potholes, random unfortunate roadkill and crumbling asphalt as we cruised at a slow crawl alongside saturated layers of soggy bluff, he, tight-lipped as he navigated switchbacks with a bird’s-eye view of the empty beach and angry surf below. The Pacific Ocean is a dramatic landscape painting that begs to be made. One of these days I’ll get around to my fulfilling a minor fantasy of mine in setting up an artist’s easel and a blank canvas. I can see it now as I slowly and luxuriously drag my thumb through several long layers of thick, dense, acrylic, blending the elements in one extended, shameless smudge of muted indigo topped by a deeper, thicker, darker charcoal color and another, a third, paler, clumpier streak of shimmering silver, in the form of one of the looming, low hanging storm clouds I picture with my eyes closed. A triangular, wooden easel set up in the old dairy pasture in full view of the Pacific, my thumb coated with messy wet paint, sensory and expressive and indulgent, like a kindergartner with nothing to worry about other than creating something base yet meaningful from absolutely nothing.
“Have you ever seen anything so insane, so darn beautiful?” I asked, arranging the elements in my mind. He, thankfully, was concentrating on the road, not in the least inspired by the scenery. A heavy frown deepened, etched into a crevice carved above the bridge of his metal eyeglass frame.
“Gnarly, more like,” he replied, a smattering of urban slang unbefitting of his earnest character, I thought. I’d sat alongside and eaten lunch with zealous and purposeful coworkers from practically every country on earth over the years. I looked at him quizzically.
“Foreign student,” he said. “UC Berkeley. Engineering, masters.” No wonder he’d harbored concerns with regard to the risks of smart technology. It’s no longer science fiction, is it? Hawking, Gates, Musk, they’ve all spoken publicly on the dangers of misaligned intelligence. Is anyone taking notes? The thought crossed my mind to open the door and throw myself out. The future is a scary place. I’d come dangerously close to spilling my guts to an engineering student from Iraq or Afghanistan or Lebanon, wherever. I couldn’t have cared less where in the world he was from, we’re all here on the same uphill battle as far as I’m concerned. I did care that he thought me an idiot for dragging him out here on such a shitty afternoon. Still, it had felt good to have some company, to speak candidly to someone who had absolutely no reason to judge. I’d been isolated for all intents and purposes, holed up alon
e for a punishing stretch of miserably dark days and nights and his putting himself out there to get me where I needed to be was significant in my book even if he was about to be paid handsomely for it.
“This, here, mister hard working, ethical, ambitious engineering student with your entire life ahead of you,” I said, laying it on the line: “is you assisting me in bailing. Human-to-human. I’m over it, you see, the whole cursed monotone of concrete city life. I can’t take any more of it. The homeless masses begging for scraps dropped by passing billionaires. Big tech’s evil quest to save the world has lost its allure with me.”
He peeled his eyes off the rain-soaked road and shot me a look of genuine concern. I was one of those rides, one of the bunglers, the squandering losers in life guaranteed to share way too much unwanted personal information. Before I blurted out anything else I might have regretted, I rolled the window down a slither and sucked in the first of the chill, dank air, the taste of ozone on my tongue, the smell of musky plant oils and pungent bacteria spores — the damp earth that continues to reignite the more potent memories of my childhood years. He offered me a small bottle of sealed water from the drink holder in the central console.
“I wish you well out there in the world, hon, but, as for me, well, I’ve jumped ship from all of it — the decadence, the corruption, the lies.” I’d started up again, despite myself. “Do us all a favor. Please don’t be suckered into engineering anything that has the potential to be smarter than yourself.”
We’d reached the end of the potholed mud pit of a single-track lane that led to the ranch, literally the end of the road as far as I was concerned. My heartbeat raced. I braced myself for the possibility of a panic attack, the sort that make me think I’m having a freaking heart attack. To my relief, the stampede of hysteria failed to materialize. Admitting my colossal failures to a stranger had been a revelation of sorts, I guess, a small one, but a start. Anyway, he was the one who had opened the floodgates with his snippets of well-meaning, genial conversation.
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