The Gardener of Eden

by David Downie

  Given the political climate nationwide, and especially in the county, I remarked, and especially given the boy’s obvious ethnic genetic component, they were lucky he hadn’t been placed in a juvenile detention center pending a decision by ICE.

  Shaking her head, Maggie whispered under her breath, “I haven’t told you the most important thing.” She paused to glance around and up at the bluffs along Graveyard Beach as if someone above were listening. “We’re being sheltered.”

  “Sheltered?”

  She squeezed my hands and dipped and wagged her head in that strange, singular, meaningless movement she had imparted to Taz. “Yes,” she whispered in confirmation, “by Harvey.”

  “Harvey?” I blurted out, a sudden fury turning my cheeks crimson. “What does he have on you?”

  “On me, nothing, it’s what I have on him.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  From the beach inland for about half a mile, the banks of Five Mile Creek meandered through lush undergrowth. Atop them, a hiking trail paralleling the course of the creek had once been part of the coastal parks network. Now it was a mad botanist’s medley of raspberry bramble, nettle, and poison oak, unpassable to all but the intrepid. Wearing long-sleeved leather gloves and thick overalls tucked into waders, and armed with machetes, handsaws, and clippers, James and Taz began hacking and snipping their way along the abandoned trail, pausing every ten to fifteen feet to check the condition of the creek’s banks and bed. Could salmon still swim upstream? That was the question.

  Related sub-queries revolved around the amount of shade and branch cover, the temperature, depth, flow-rate, clarity and purity of the creek, and the existence of potential manmade or natural obstacles. Without a laboratory to test the water James could only begin, for the time being, with a visual inspection.

  Forty years earlier, the creek had been “restored” to a natural condition along its eight-mile length from the beach to the hatchery to facilitate salmon migration. Fishing was not allowed, and the right of way on both banks belonged to the county. Fish ladders were not needed. This was a wild waterway. Several culverts crossing the unpaved logging road up the valley had been modified to avoid the accumulation of silt, and many “NCV” trees and shrubs with no commercial value had been planted strategically to provide cover and keep the water cool. The creek bed had been reconfigured, deepened or cleared, in a number of places. Drafted by his father during school holidays, James had done some of the heavy lifting himself, learning to use a bulldozer and drive a logging rig. He wondered how much of that monumental effort engineered and led by a manic, authoritarian Purple Heart major had been lost in the interim, after the defunding and shutdown of Wildlife & Fish. Judging by the first section of the creek, the prospects were good.

  Their first objective that morning was to blaze a trail east under the crumbling concrete viaduct as far as the riverside beach, where the gravel road came down the incline in dusty switchbacks from the Old Coast Highway. The spot was easy to find. The dust always left seemingly indelible white tire marks on the asphalt above, once upon a time inviting the mammoth logging trucks to turn in. But the trucks and the swerving marks of their giant tires were things of the past, like so many features of the green, marshy, pleasant valley.

  It was at this beachhead that the locals used to swim and fish illegally, James recalled, the place where settlers a century and a half earlier had built rustic wooden piers and shacks, and where around 1880 the narrow-gauge logging trains had come down on sturdy rough-hewn trestles from Big Mountain, appearing under black clouds of soot and steam from the thick fir woods on the north side of the creek. From there they banked north again along the shoulder of the old highway before entering the mill on the headlands two miles away. The settlers, the train, the mill, the trees were gone, even the local children who swam and fished at the beach were gone, by the looks of it, like the trucks and the dusty tracks on the tarmac.

  Parked on the shoulder of the gravel road by the steep rocky beach, Maggie awaited them with a thermos and, at Taz’s request, a bag of cinnamon rolls. She had declined the honor of trekking on the abandoned trail. Unlike James and Taz, who shared a natural resistance to poison oak, Maggie was virulently sensitive to the noxious oil on the plant’s shiny, oak-like leaves. More than once after coming in contact with it, she had been hospitalized with suppurating boils, an alarming purple-and-red rash, conjunctivitis that swelled her eyelids into elephantine flaps, and severe respiratory difficulty. Injected and coated with cortisone, then wrapped head to foot in bandages, she had looked like a burn victim or a mummy. That was why she ran each morning on the beach, never inland. No inducement short of imminent peril could persuade her to venture anywhere poison oak might grow.

  “So far so good,” James reported, rinsing his face and hands in the cold creek water before approaching. Maggie set the coffee and rolls on the hood of the car and backed off, retracting her hands into the sleeves of her winter coat.

  “Even if I just brush your clothes with my skin I’ll get it,” she said, seemingly faced by bearers of the plague.

  “It looks like fish could still swim up,” Taz remarked, brimming with instant expertise and unusual brio. “We might have to haul those old truck tires out of the creek,” he added, echoing the comments James had made along the way, “and who knows what lies ahead, right?”

  “Right,” said James, amused. “We still have five miles to go.”

  The ocean wind had died down and the sun was struggling through the river mist. James had forgotten how radically the weather could change just a few miles inland from the beach.

  Pumped full of coffee, their bloodstreams rushing with sugar, they set off again, the trail seemingly easier to follow along this second section of the creek, thanks to the proximity of the old logging road. Jogging parallel to the south bank, it was still used by the handful of longtime locals homesteading the ragged edges of the lower Five Mile Valley in what had once been primeval forestlands. Traffic was negligible but when a car or truck did pass by, volutes of dust rose, coating the vegetation and suffocating anyone nearby. Farther northeast, the road petered out at a crest on Big Mountain near the fountainhead of Five Mile Creek, but they would not be walking that far.

  For several miles after the beachhead, the creek ran in a gentle curve over a rocky bed protected by stands of birch, aspen, and cotton willow, their quaking leaves a mesmerizing yellow, russet, and pistachio blur, the only touches of color in a universe of stubby green firs and barren brown clear-cuts. Reeds grew along the edges of the creek. Perched here and there on branches overcasting the water or hidden in the overhanging vegetation were kingfishers and egrets. Taz spotted a brace of quail seconds before the birds burst out of the riverside tangle, blowing past with extravagant trailing feathers. Ducks bobbed and quacked midstream, taking flight at the approach of the explorers, then circling and landing noisily moments later, spraying water to both sides as they landed.

  “What’s the word?” James shouted back over his shoulder.

  “Bird brain,” Taz said. “Those ducks are, like, pretty stupid.” Before James could answer, Taz added, “I smell a skunk. Maybe we should go up and walk on the road for a while.”

  “Nah.” James laughed. “It’ll run away once it smells us. I’d rather walk in the water anyway. Best way to escape a skunk—or a dog.” He veered down to the bank and clambered into the stream, feeling the iciness of the water through the rubber waders and boots. “Come on down, I don’t think the salmon will bite you.”

  It wasn’t just the weather that changed radically the farther away from the ocean you went. The human fauna also morphed from mildly obnoxious hick, hayseed, and hip-neck on the coastal strip, to potentially lethal hillbilly and Appalachian-style throwback a few miles upstream. Supplementing the usual NO TRESPASSING signs, James spotted several variations on the theme. Taz took photos from the middle of the creek, zooming in as they walked swiftly along, more amused than frightened. We Shoot 2 Kill promised one,
God Bless Semiautomatics announced another, The Second Amendment Starts Here! shouted a third. Taz’s favorites were the farthest inland, marking the razor wire and recycled box spring border fence of a colorful, stinking, hound-filled rural slum. Thou Shalt Not Enter Without Being Shot Full of Holes said one, Trespassers Will Be Shot. Survivors Will Be Shot Again! read the other, echoing the sign James had seen on the fence around the mill property.

  By 11:30 A.M. they had covered about five miles of picturesque waterway and had found few impediments to fish migration. The incline increased slowly but steadily, the creek narrowing with the valley as the confluents became smaller, clearer, colder, faster, and fluty. James was feeling upbeat. “We have half an hour to cover the last mile,” he announced.

  “Picnic lunch here we come!” Taz yelled.

  Splashing and sliding as they ran up the creek, laughing out loud, shouting and quacking like loons, they suddenly slackened their pace when they clambered up the banks near the former hatchery and saw Maggie was not there.

  “Think she had a flat tire?” Taz asked, digging for his smartphone in the bottomless pockets of his overalls. Striding and searching as if divining for water, he ranged far and wide, trying but failing to find connectivity. “No service,” he announced, “no Grandma.”

  “She probably bumped into Beverley at the supermarket,” James remarked, “you know how Beverley talks.”

  “Right,” Taz said, unconvinced.

  Surveying the site, James could not repress a moan. In disbelief he walked the periphery of the parking lot and the old Wildlife & Fish headquarters, avoiding the paper and plastic bags, the dirty Styrofoam containers and balled up fast food wrappers, the broken beer bottles, used condoms in a kaleidoscope of black, red, white, yellow, and green, and the mounds of filthy tissue paper and human excrement. There were piles of discarded household appliances—a stove, a water heater, a tangle of cast-iron radiators—mountains of rubble, worn-out car and truck tires, used syringes, crumpled cigarette packs, and other waste he could not identify. Some of it was sealed in large gray plastic bags. Nudging cautiously with his rubber waders, he rolled one of the bags over and saw it was marked with a radioactivity symbol, a skull and crossbones, and the words HOSPITAL WASTE.

  Beyond the slumping, broken-down chain-link fence stood the charred remains of what had been his father’s office, a long one-story building with a slanting shingle roof now shot full of holes. The lab buildings, huts, sheds, garages, and dormitories once used by Wildlife & Fish employees for their various tasks were likewise charred ruins, their walls sprayed with swastikas and incomprehensible slogans or tags. The vandalism was so virulent and thorough that James found himself gloomily thinking the only thing to do would be to bulldoze what remained and start afresh.

  The heart of the hatchery lay in back, in the woods by the creek. Pushing through another collapsed fence and following a rutted logging road across the compound, he found the parallel channels and deep millraces built of concrete, with gates and locks, flow-through tanks, pens and pools of various size and depth where the fertilized eggs of the fish were deposited and the fry hatched and grown, spending the crucial early phases of their development. This was where the mysterious instinctive programming occurred, the scent and peculiar qualities of the waters of Five Mile Creek somehow embedding themselves into the primitive brains and navigational systems of the fish. When mature enough, they would be released to swim downstream to the sea, where they disappeared for a number of years. Later in their life spans, when the time came to spawn, the salmon would somehow retrace their way, sensing the creek’s waters in the vastness of the ocean, then struggling upstream until they found the spot to lay eggs or deposit sperm. Worn out from their efforts, their bodies torn and ulcerated, they would wait passively in the shallows until going belly up and rotting, or being seized in beak or claw by hawks, ravens, raccoons, coyotes, foxes, or bears.

  Ignoring the blistered and bent NO TRESPASSING signs lying on the litter-covered ground, James climbed through a third ring of broken fencing and inspected the channels and pools. Nearly all were choked with the giant gray hospital refuse bags, plus leaves, dirt, and dead branches. The water barely trickled through. The largest pool, in effect a holding pond with a dam, had become a cesspit filled with thick, black, foul-smelling sludge. Glancing into it, James caught sight of an oblong animal trap seemingly dumped there. Above it, looped around the branch of an overhanging beech tree, swung a winch and tackle. “Stay back,” he shouted at Taz, “get back out into the parking lot.” Looking as if he’d been slapped across the face, Taz retreated on tiptoe.

  Immobilized, James stared at the pit. The vision of Jack Murphy in his bamboo cage in the Mekong Delta welled up, Jack’s chin barely above water level as he whimpered and screamed and thrashed in madness. A single word revolved in James’s mind like a vulture swirling overhead. Why? Why? Why?

  With a hunted, hangdog look, Taz waited by a downed fence, peering around at the wreckage. “So, like, where’s the hatchery?”

  Muttering, James waved at the system of water channels they’d seen then turned suddenly, hearing a mechanical sound, a strange yet familiar sound of a car approaching and something else. He and Taz looked up simultaneously to see a large octopus-like drone hovering over the treetops down the road in the direction they had come from. In the silence of the valley, the swirling rotors sounded like hornets swarming around an electric lawn mower. Striding back through the last ring of fences and standing in the pocked, garbage-strewn parking lot, they shaded their eyes and watched the drone zip suddenly toward the gravel road, then fly directly above a compact car that was bumping slowly toward them over the ruts, raising convolutions of grayish-white dust. Before the dust could settle, the drone shot straight up at lightning speed, spun around and flew back down the valley, a mutant dragonfly from hell.

  Waiting a full minute for the dust to settle before stepping out of her car, Maggie leaned on the jamb and stared up at the sky. “You didn’t order anything else with my credit card did you, Alex?” The ironic tone made her sound like Mae West asking about pistols in pockets.

  “Pizza,” he said. No one laughed.

  “Somehow, I don’t think we’ll be having our picnic here,” James added before Maggie could finish apologizing for being late, or comment on the strange sensation she had had while driving. She knew she was being followed and observed, she said, but could not see or hear her pursuer.

  Swapping their expeditionary outfits for normal clothes and hiking boots, then wiping their hands, arms, and faces with an oil-removing gel, the two men piled glumly into the car with Maggie at the wheel.

  “Road” was an imperfect description of the trashed, rutted, potholed dirt squiggle that wormed its way up through tatty second- and third-growth fir forests clinging to steep ravines on the flanks of Big Mountain. The average running speed of the low-slung rear-wheel-drive compact was five miles per hour. By the time they emerged from the scruffy woods and neared the end of the road, about three miles upstream from the hatchery, they had been driving for about forty minutes. It was one P.M. Despite the drone and the scene at the hatchery, all three had worked up a more than healthy appetite and, at least superficially, their good spirits had returned.

  Rounding a final bend and parking on the edge of a clearing, they were surprised to see a vintage Carverville School District bus pulled up across the way under a stand of mature Douglas firs, the only full-grown trees left for as far as the eye could see. James peered at the windows of the bus and wondered why they were covered with thick iron grillwork.

  “School excursion,” Taz said, “I remember when we came up here, like, four years ago. But I think there were more trees.”

  Maggie and James exchanged doubtful glances and made evasive remarks, each sketchily recalling their own excursions to this hallowed spot, where, in their day, teens had flocked at night to drink, smoke, listen to music on their eight-track car stereos, and have sex. Neither had been back
in nearly forty years, but both vaguely remembered the well-worn hiking trail to Narrow Rocks and the source of Five Mile Creek, where, in theory, they would find picnic tables and bathrooms and a “sacred forest” in memory of the Yono tribe, whose land this once had been.

  “I have a better idea,” Maggie said, rummaging in the trunk and producing a worn, faded old blanket. “The picnic area will be full of those schoolkids, so let’s go into the woods over there instead.”

  James and Taz grabbed the picnic bags and thermos and rushed ahead, checking for poison oak and giving the all clear—the terrain had been bulldozed during a recent clear-cut, then charred by wildfires. Nothing green had survived.

  The air was cooler here at nearly two thousand feet above sea level, almost cold, and there was more wind than in the valley. Pockets of fog clung to the canyons and hollows below. Vultures and red-tailed hawks hung on thermals in the powder-blue sky. Far out to sea, a wall of black clouds closed off the western horizon.

  “Weather is on the way,” James remarked.

  “Nah,” said Taz, “that happens all the time then it, like, never rains.”

  Maggie agreed. “We’ve seen those very same black clouds appear every few months for the last five years,” she said. “It’s a standing joke.”

  “If I could get up to a Doppler radar website I could, like, check on the thunderheads,” Taz added, trying his smartphone again. There was no connectivity here, either.