California Calling

by Natalie Singer

  Like the ideal outcome of going west, The Land of Little Rain arcs from the Mojave Desert to the lusher lands: from want to fulfillment.

  From drought to plenty.

  Her intellect and heart had their home in desert places

  It was not all easy. It was not all slick like seals. It was not all ear-piercing pleasure in the desert.

  He was raw and I was raw but in two different ways. He did not care about anything that composed an image or an ego. He was stripped down. He liked objects that were worked over, falling-apart furniture and holey T-shirts. He was of the land, not just tiptoeing across it like I was. He danced like a drunk turkey because it made him happy. He had begun again a while back and was further ahead.

  I was finding a voice, but I still worried about who was watching. Don’t be, he whispered into me, you can say anything you want. He wanted to hear me scream.

  We moved in together after being questioned by a Palm Springs landlord in a white pantsuit named Merle, who wanted to make sure we thought Jesus would be alright with it. We bit our lips and said we thought he would be.

  We moved in together and nature moved in with us. In the shower, desert cockroaches as big as matchboxes fell on me. Bighorn sheep, their heads heavy, clicked calmly down the mountain and circled our apartment, flirting languidly with traffic until Lukas phoned the agency with Jeeps that gently chased them back up the rocks. His cat, Girlfriend, brought in birds and desert mice and other things still alive.

  What does it mean to be good?

  One night a few months after we moved into a desert apartment brimming with fuchsia bougainvillea, I was leaning over to switch off the light on my bedside table when I glimpsed something iridescent coral, scales like jewels, on the carpet beside me. It moved, flashing a tail. I flew upright and stood on the bed, the scream already pouring from me.

  Lukas moved quickly, on hands and knees, closing doors, shuffling furniture, coaxing and trapping while I kept my eyes squeezed shut and cried, not thinking for a second to smile, to wait patiently.

  It’s out, he said after a few minutes, waving the lizard on its way. How big, I gasped, sinking into the pillows. A foot or two he said and grinned.

  I scowled at Girlfriend, who sat still in the corner looking at us like, what?

  What is at risk?

  One weekend we hiked up into the gray-brown hills along a seared trail that crumbled under our boots. I was jumpy, scanning for coils of white or brown, listening for rattling, thinking ahead to a margarita with dinner, to the inside cool. Relax, he said, and I tried but also resisted, said to myself about him, Fuck you, fear is not so permeable.

  We passed the remains of a long-ago cabin, only its sooted brick chimney remaining, angled sideways like a frontier Tower of Pisa. Desert rats, the locals called the type of person who came out to the empty to hide, to piece together a shack and crouch below the radar of scrutiny.

  Up ahead and off the edge of the trail, in a hollow piled with small boulders and debris, sat a desiccated armchair, sun-bleached stuffing and springs popping out the center. Lukas got a look on his face and scrambled down the slope.

  No! I called, loudly, Don’t you even. Why not, he shrugged, pausing to look up at me, his brow a question. And he eased himself in, unconcerned about what else might be lurking or how the borders of human and landscape were growing messier all the time.

  I watched him lean back, sitting there all relaxed in that desert rat chair, long abandoned to the elements, grinning at me like he had the answer to something.

  What is the lesson?

  The desert around Palm Springs is the only place in the world that provides habitat for the webbed-foot Coachella Valley fringe-toed lizard, special because of how it saunters, ballerina-like, across the shifting dunes. The lizard is endangered thanks to nonnative grasses. The grasses, brought by humans, take hold on the dunes and interrupt the fine windblown sand the lizard requires to live.

  Too much grass, too much rooting, solidifies the dunes when they are supposed to remain moving and free.

  What do I think California will be like?

  In the Southern California desert the place I found that most disturbs is a body of water called the Salton Sea. The manmade sea is the largest lake in California, smack on the San Andreas Fault. When a levee broke along the Colorado River in 1905, the sea formed in its basin below sea level. Inflow came after that from agricultural runoff, started coming and couldn’t stop. Evaporation is the only outflow, so salt levels in the sea have grown and grown and grown; it is 30 percent saltier than the ocean.

  In the fifties and sixties, the thirty-five-mile-long lake drew vacationers in droves. They came to the sea’s luxury hotels from Los Angeles and beyond in station wagons and campers, Elvis and the Beach Boys crooning from speakers, suntan oil ready. Celebrities and the wealthy raced speedboats on the lake, the salinity offering a buoyancy that lifted the boats and a thrill that could not be matched. In the eighties, the Department of Fish and Wildlife introduced sport fishing, and hundreds of species of birds riding the Pacific Flyway, desperate for wetlands as the state’s development gobbled up nature’s spaces, descended on the water en masse. At one time, 400,000 boats a year bobbed on the lake. More people visited the Salton Sea than Yosemite National Park.

  But what man makes, nature eventually wrenches back. Because the lake’s inflow comes mostly from agricultural runoff, nutrients and fertilizers built up. Eutrophication, it’s called, excessive nutrients in a body of water. This causes algae blooms and other microscopic plants to flourish—a growth cycle that has Frankensteined: The blooms block out the sun, obstructing bottom-dwelling plants. When the algae dies it uses all the dissolved oxygen. The fish literally suffocate. Scientists have attempted many solutions to save the sea, the fish, the birds, but none have proven viable, and time is running out.

  Yet despite this imminent death, the lake is one of the most ecologically fruitful places on Earth. Time here is on fast-forward, on steroids. Nutrients, warm water, and prolific species mix to make a swarming cocktail of life.

  Lukas wrote often for the newspaper about the sea, its animals, and the environmental implications of its evolution. The idea of a massive lake—even a flawed one—in the midst of a thirsty desert enthralled me; I wanted to see it for myself. One Saturday we took the fifty-mile drive east from Palm Springs along Highway 111, moving out of the urban area where we lived, away from the steakhouses and multiplex theaters that had begun to creep up on the formerly sleepy strip of desert resorts and second homes, into farmland and then the desert’s gaping beige empty.

  After an hour we arrived at the Salton Sea and pulled into an area that had once been called Bombay Beach, a place that was now, I could see, only a burned-out backdrop for hollow trailers, abandoned motels, jagged signposts, and the remnants of pier pilings slowly overtaken by the lake’s lapping, killer water. All that remained of a place that once epitomized the California dream was an arid ghost town shimmering on this desert edge of a lake that at first seemed to me so blue and sprawling and incongruous it should be a phantasm.

  We left the car on the road and walked toward the sea. On approach, the shore appeared to be made of sand, like most beaches. But once we stepped onto it, I saw that the sand was not sand at all but a graveyard made entirely of crushed fish bones. Deprived of oxygen, millions of fish a year wash up dead. They are pecked at by birds, scorched by the sun, stripped and shriveled, reduced to skeleton and dust.

  The water, I saw, was a deception, too. Up close, from that white shore of ashes, it was no longer cerulean but a murky brown, or in some angles of light an otherworldly yellow, glowing with warning.

  I bent and scooped a handful of crushed fish, letting the pieces of carcass sift through my fingers. The air around us stank like sulfur, full with the orgasm of rot. Holding our breaths, we held hands and sunk our toes into the bones.

  The myth and the mirage

  I’ve said nothing about grief. Which means I have sa
id nothing. Or maybe I have spoken of it, or tucked it between the silences, my own fault margins. In any case it is here, trying to stay folded and unseen, like crusts and rift zones and salt basins, stretching and sinking and rupturing, reshaped by the combined actions of the forces of time. It is in the groves of a spinning 45. In the tip of the needle of the arm of a brushed steel turntable in a mahogany box, lifted with all the delicacy a six-year-old girl’s fingers can muster. A good girl. A needle placed carefully on the record while her mother and father look on.

  Where are you really from?

  I will leave California one day. But, before that, I return to her, from a trip east with Lukas to his family’s land in Arizona. After a few days there we drive back westward through the fields of saguaros and cholla and prickly pear his parents can turn into wine. In this expanse of nothing we have a hard fight that travels for hours and hours and rips everything open, pulling the seams apart like grains of sand. It is about assimilating into each other. To make something new you must shift your allegiance, something he is slow to realize and I am impatient to resolve.

  The desert shames us with her species’ adaptations, Austin writes, their ability to flower, to fruit in the waterless scorch, to scamper and scavenge and procreate. “One hopes the land may breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to ‘try’ but to do.”

  In the white truce of noon, moving west along that open road, we speed all the way up to the crumbling, arid precipice, and then, somehow, we slowly circle ourselves back. To drink from the fabled desert river Hassaympa, Austin tells us, is to “no more see fact as naked fact, but all radiance as with the color of romance.” Hollowed out from our fight, more awake than we’ve ever been, we seek out the quenching shade, the spring that will water us a long time.

  Completion

  On the other end of that fight in the middle of nowhere on the hot ribbon of the 10 we reach the dividing line between Arizona and California and, how strange, a guard in a box awaits us. Watching the border, I suppose, checking for proof and for truth.

  Lukas rolls down the window to the furnace heat.

  Just you two? the guard, in aviators, asks.

  We nod. I look ahead of us on the road, which points all the way west to the Pacific Ocean, the blacktop flickering in the heat the same way the road behind us from Phoenix did. Just ahead, beyond this invisible border, is a different place. The map says so. This sign at the booth, Welcome to California, says so.

  I look at the guard, who asks us: Where are you headed?

  And here’s where I do a funny thing. I don’t even have being newly landed as an excuse—I’ve been here eight years already. But maybe it takes that long.

  Where are you headed? he asks us.

  From the passenger seat I lean across Lukas, my hand curved over the solid berm of his thigh, the skin whose salt I have drank.

  Where am I headed?

  California! I blurt, involuntarily, triumphant at my silly naming of not a city or town, which is the specific final destination the guard wants to know, but instead just the obvious name of the dirt we’ve already rolled onto. When ordered to explain myself, I state the place I’m clearly going.

  California.

  Here is my moment of crossing, the evidence of it. Of being absorbed.

  Acknowledgments

  I AM IMMENSELY GRATEFUL TO THE EDITORIAL STAFF AT HAWTHORNE Books, particularly Rhonda Hughes, who saw my California dream the way I hoped it could be seen. Thanks to Sarah Dowling for the many patient reads and encouragement, and to the faculty and my cohort at the University of Washington Bothell MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics (especially Dave Sanders, Tracy Gregory, Ellen Donnelly, Andrew Carson, Rebecca Brown, Jeanne Heuving, and Amaranth Borsuk) for receiving and responding to my work. Endless gratitude to Kellini Walter, Dana Montanari, Wendy Staley Colbert, and Abigail Carter for your support, love, words, breakfasts, escapes to cozy cabins with wood-burning stoves, and for traveling this writer journey alongside me. Special thank you to Theo Nestor, for showing me how it’s done and for providing unconditional reassurance, inspiration, and, when needed, life support, and for your more-precious-than-gold friendship. To Suzanne Swirsky, my lifelong champion, shark expert, memory holder, the Diana Barry to my Anne Shirley: I would be nothing without you. My deepest love and gratitude to Lukas, Lola, and Tansy Velush, who form the shape of my heart. And to my family, and especially to my parents: thank you for the music.