Beacons

by Gregory Norminton

  ‘We’re not talking about your comfort, or your dad’s.’

  ‘Is it too hot, then?’ you ask her.

  She tells you that in your place she would have worn a jumper instead of cranking up the heat. That, for sure, this shows that you’re more urban than she is. But, no it’s not too hot, no. You’re not sure if she’s lying and start watching her differently. She sleeps untidily at night: kicks down the duvet. You pull it back up. How could she, you tell yourself, how could she?

  In the morning she makes coffee while you crouch in front of the bonsai.

  ‘It’s not personal,’ she says. ‘It’s science.’

  ‘You mean nature,’ you suggest.

  ‘Same thing,’ she says. ‘It’s just the way things are.’

  You tell her elms die outside. There’s a foreign disease out there that gets them.

  ‘But not the miniature elms maybe,’ she says, ‘they’re made of stronger stuff.’

  You don’t give in; you consider the balcony but you don’t do it. It’s a decorative plant, so what’s the point of it if it can’t be seen? So, contained in this beautiful, perfect flat, with artwork by foreign photographers of children with stories in their eyes and no shoes, your bonsai loses its last but one leaf.

  ■

  You bend low and analyse the tiny point of contact between leaf and bark; try to find what it is that gives up right there. You fail, but find yourself staring until your lower back aches. You’re tempted to pluck out the remaining leaf, to get the whole thing over and done with. But this posture isn’t natural for you, and actually really hurts, so you stand up straight, resist the urge to touch the tree, and grab your coat to head to work. On the bus, you tell yourself that you really are killing it and should have stuck it on the balcony.

  The last leaf is on the mantelpiece on your return. The tree is gone, the marble polished where the pot stood. It’s been manhandled again, this time carried by sweaty hands to share a garden with grasses, with bruised heads of great burnets, liquorice milk-vetch covered in sun spots, devil’s-bit, blood-veined eyebright, clots of comfrey and meadowsweet frothing above it all. It’s abandoned there until it feels better. Once in a while, she brings it in; places it in the middle of the kitchen table and tucks into a plate of poached egg on toast, dandelion and sorrel salad, picks at her nails and the muddy feet of the bonsai pot; drinks tea. She grows nut-skinned, sometimes wonders – did you ever know that you were the one who changed everything? – and takes another sip of tea. Sometime around the bonsai’s hundred-and-fiftieth year, you die, mid-crane lift, outside your apartment window.

  ‌Earthship

  ‌Lawrence Norfolk

  You can see them from the top of Saint Anthony’s Isle, their long glass walls glinting, their solar panels sopping up the early morning sun as that morning’s fleet sets out. The long-drifters spin slowly as the currents nudge them, the bulky float-tanks jiggling over the gentle swell. The simpler rafts bob up and down. Sometimes as many as a hundred will set off together. A dozen or so is more usual, the under-floats or hulls tied to one another with thick black cables.

  I watch for a long time. Always, once they’re clear of the quays and piers, one or more will cut loose and float free, slowly separating from the other craft. Off on some frolic of its own. Soloes, they’re called. They let the currents take them, drifting away wherever. It’s unwise, even on a well-equipped raft. A lot never come back. But I think they’re the ones that really understand what’s happened. Those are the ones I watch.

  Of course there’s not much else of New Mexico to watch any more. But back when Saint Anthony’s Isle was Mount San Antonio and the tail end of the Rockies was a mountain range, not an archipelago, the wettest thing about the Land of Enchantment was the Rio Grande. That was where I and my girlfriend Al fetched up in the summer of 1995 on the south-west leg of our Great American Road Trip.

  We had met on a lit course after I had dropped out of applied math. Al was one of three women in the theory class, out of which she dropped after six belligerent seminars because of her ‘pathological regard for the likes of D.H. Lawrence’ as the professor characterized it.

  I bumped into her again about a year later in a bar when a pair of white forearms ruffed in rolled-up light blue shirt sleeves wiped the table top in front of me. The hands were white too, the nails unpolished. They lacked that resigned quality that a real waitress’s hands have. They skirted my beer. This was over four decades ago. I looked up.

  ‘Hi, Al.’

  She was a dark-haired, wide-hipped girl with a full mouth and a silver nose ring. She pretended not to recognize me (she admitted it later) then pretended to be pleased to see me again. She had quit college altogether and was writing or not-writing a novel called Running Girl. I don’t know why I asked her to meet me later, or why she agreed. People now think it’s only rafters that just float along but there was plenty of drift back then too.

  She called me ‘Cad’ (for Cadwallader, my middle name) when, drunk, we took the stairs up to her apartment that night. When I moved in, this became ‘Wal’ (pronounced like ‘Wally’ but without the ‘y’).

  She could not cook and I could. I could not drive and she could. Our complementarity began and ended there. Besides the nose ring, she wore heavy boots and men’s shirts which she tucked loosely into tight black jeans. I stuck to cords. I had gone to a private school while she had spent at least part of her late teens living in a teepee with a couple, about whom I knew only that the man was called Jez and that Al had had some kind of relationship with him. I could believe it. Certain kinds of men were drawn to her, engaging her in sharply focused discussions and nodding earnestly in the hope that she would sleep with them. She always attracted the committed types.

  Of course that attraction would be publicly and even spectacularly evidenced in the years to come but at the time no one, least of all me and Al, had the slightest idea what those years would hold. In the meantime, other men’s desires broke against the adamantine cliff of Al’s earnestness. I observed, cooked and was driven around for five semesters. When our second summer came around, Al more or less insisted on, then organized, a road trip.

  We had hired a Buick Regal. For the large majority of the population of Planet Earth who have never driven and never will drive such a vehicle, the Regal featured a 3-litre V6 engine, a rubber-hammock-style suspension and a ride best described as imperturbable. Its engine made a distinctive low hum which never varied whether the car was speeding along the Hoover Dam, descending the buttes of Arizona or climbing the Rockies. We had picked it up in Vegas but the strange weather that year had forced us south into New Mexico.

  In Taos we fell in with a guy called Jason who offered to take us rafting down the Rio Grande. The next day, after speculating whether or not Jason was a psychopath who would lure us out there and murder us, we ate breakfast and set off to meet our guide.

  ‘The roads are pretty rough out there,’ Jason told us, indicating his battered 4 x 4. ‘Why don’t you jump in?’

  ‘We thought we’d take our car,’ I said stiffly.

  ‘Sure.’

  ■

  Jason took the I-64 then turned right onto a dirt road. We followed. After a few miles bumping along, we noticed what looked like a row of windows out in the distant scrub. It was set into a bank of earth. A chimney-thing rose beside it. A similar structure showed a few hundred yards away from the first, then several others, more distant. Al and I stared, trying to make sense of these odd-looking dwellings out here in the middle of nowhere. But the road took us away and soon we took a left onto another, bumpier dirt track where we lost sight of the glass things. After a few more miles the track broke up and the Buick started bottoming out. Jason parked about a hundred yards further on. We were at the edge of the gorge.

  The young will know the Rio Grande only from the pre-Rise maps that their parents bring out to show where Ma and Pa used to live, but old-landers will remember this part of it from the hot springs bat
hing scene in Easy Rider. It looked vaguely familiar to me that morning.

  The odd structures we’d seen, Jason explained, were earthships.

  ‘They make them out of old tyres and cans. They’re self-sufficient. There’s water out here but it’s under five hundred feet of rock. These guys gather rain and recycle. They put in compost toilets, planters, cisterns …’

  He talked on as we descended. The path to the Rio Grande wound down. The heat was baking but Al was paying close attention. Jason was getting the earnest look.

  When we got to the bottom we discovered that the Rio Grande was too low for rafting. Al paddled in the hot springs, stripping off her jeans and unfurling the shirt she’d borrowed from me into a kind of rollercoaster-hemmed skirt. I watched the water drops slide down her calves and wondered again why the whole place seemed familiar. Jason sat on a rock. When it was time to ascend he decided to run it. We decided to trudge. At the top, Jason (when he’d finished being sick) told us about the Easy Rider connection, then gave us directions to a cantina owned by a couple of friends of his which served the best mixed fajitas in New Mexico. We could reconvene for lunch. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to get roped into lunch. Maybe, I said. We watched Jason’s 4 x 4 bump away then got back in the Buick. That’s when we found the car wouldn’t move.

  ■

  In Death Valley back then temperatures regularly topped 120 degrees and you were told that, in the event of breakdown, you should under no circumstances leave your car. But Death Valley, apart from being one of the deadliest places on earth, was also a US National Park complete with Park Rangers, one of whom would at some point come along and rescue you. Second, we weren’t in Death Valley but outside Taos where the temperature was not 120 degrees but only (according to the Buick) a mere 104. Third, we hadn’t broken down. The engine still worked. The wheels went around (although they made a funny noise). We just weren’t going anywhere. Of course there was a simple explanation for that but at the time our predicament seemed pretty inscrutable. We had water. We had hats.

  ‘We’ll just have to hike back to the road,’ I said.

  ‘The road’s fifteen miles,’ said Al.

  ‘Well, Jason’ll know something’s up.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Al. ‘That we didn’t want lunch.’

  ‘Hiking it is, then,’ I said.

  But Al shook her head across the bonnet of the immobile Buick and pointed out into the scrub. ‘What we’re going to do is this. We’re going to check out those earthship things.’

  ■

  Earthships are long, low dwellings made from recycled materials such as tires filled with compacted dirt, tin cans and mud. A grey-water reclamation system uses exterior and interior botanical cells. The roof collects rain. Solar panels and battery arrays are self-explanatory. You grow your own food in the botanical bits and drink water filtered through the cells. Another system pressurizes the water and a big electrical box turns the DC current into AC and distributes it to power sockets, the fridge and so on. An earthship is not, in any conventional sense, a ship. Or so both Al and I understood when the first hunkered structure heaved its glass face out of the scrub two and a half hours later. This one was raised on its own little berm. Around it were set perhaps two dozen other lower dwellings. The nearest was painted in pastel blues and pinks. Motionless wind chimes hung outside. As we stood with our eyes screwed up against the glare, a glass door opened and two young, nearly identical-looking women emerged. They wore their hair short and were dressed in dungarees. They introduced themselves as Jean and Joan.

  ‘You’re late,’ Jean said.

  ‘But it’s fine,’ added Joan. ‘Where’ve you put your car?’

  ‘Car?’

  ‘You haven’t parked up by Fro’s place, right?’ She pointed behind her towards the next nearest dwellings. ‘He gets pretty grouchy about that.’

  ‘Or Mimi,’ added Jean. ‘She had a dog run over once.’

  ‘Or Gibson,’ said Joan. ‘Not that you could with all his junk.’

  As they said this, both women looked back into the scrub, searching among the different structures for wherever we’d put our vehicle. I was about to tell them our situation when a new thought struck Jean.

  ‘You didn’t leave it at Zeke’s?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Who’s Zeke?’ asked Al.

  At that the women both laughed in a relieved kind of way.

  ‘We haven’t got a car,’ I said. ‘It broke down. We walked.’

  ‘We can’t be late either,’ added Al. ‘We didn’t know we were coming.’

  Jean and Joan looked at one another again.

  ‘So you’re not the guys from the Times?’

  ■

  I believe it was the French social theorist Alain Sokal who first demonstrated how information degrades along with the rules governing its production in a closed semiotic system. Maybe that wasn’t quite how he put it but, over the next few hours, something similar happened to me and Al. We had arrived as people whose car had broken down (or not, as it eventually proved) by the banks of the Rio Grande, but now we found ourselves recast as a journalist and photographer from the LA Times. It wasn’t so much that Jean/Joan introduced us as the anticipated journos (who had already, we discovered, cancelled twice). But as they escorted us down a dirt track to the dwellings of Fro, then Mac and Jay, then Mimi, Gibson (whose dog barked non-stop during the encounter) and the other inhabitants of the Great World Earthship Community, the non-appearance of the journalists, of whose visit some had been in favour and others not, took on a significance that eclipsed our own actual appearance. Re-evaluating that instance of conceptual slippage now, I think it might have been the start of what became, for Al and me at first, then everyone else, a much greater shift that although contributed to by everyone was not actually willed by any of them, like finding yourself at the head of a slide with a great crowd of people pressing behind you, or that story about the boy on the diving board, about to take the plunge.

  ‘I want people to come out here,’ explained Mimi, a leathery-skinned middle-aged woman with full lips and bright white teeth. ‘Even journalists. We’re off-road, off-grid. We’ve got enough non-contact. We need people to see what can be done.’

  ‘What can be done?’ asked Al.

  ‘You can get away,’ said Mimi. ‘You don’t have to be alone.’

  She was in retreat from an LA divorce. Felipe next door suffered from chronic aerosol-triggered asthma. Fro waved us away in a strangely friendly way. Jay was from Montana, about which he loved everything except the minus 40 degree winters, and Gibson needed space for his stripped-down engines and the sculptures he was making out of the parts. And somewhere for his dog to bark. He pointed to the berm.

  ‘You should talk to Mike,’ Gibson said among the yelps. ‘He started all this. Designed these places.’

  ‘He’s away,’ said Joan. ‘Least his pick-up’s gone.’

  We continued the odd tour. Some didn’t open their doors. Most did, inviting us into surprisingly cool interiors that smelt pleasantly of greenhouses. We were offered water in all of them and food in most (Billie’s home-baked cornbread was the stand-out). At the end of our tour we had reached the far side of the Great World Community plot. The scrub stretched away towards distant Mount San Antonio in one direction and the snaking crack of the Rio Grande gorge in the other.

  ‘So,’ said Jean. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s great,’ I said, and Al nodded enthusiastically. It was, too: all these slightly strange people making homes out of junk in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. I’d expected at least one of them to kick off about UN-sponsored parachutists or Area 51 or aliens. But none of them had.

  But neither had any of them offered us a lift back to town. Jean/Joan, Al and myself stood at the edge of the desert and smiled at each other.

  ‘So,’ said Joan.

  The moment stretched. Then off towards the gorge I saw a glint of light. Another earthship lay ab
out half a mile away, set off from the others.

  ‘Who’s over there?’ I asked.

  Jean and Joan exchanged looks. ‘That’s Zeke,’ they said at the same time and laughed. Al and I laughed too.

  ‘He’s slightly crazy,’ said Jean.

  ‘Not bad-crazy,’ Joan hastened to add. ‘He was out here first. With Mike. You should talk to him. I mean, if you were journalists.’

  ‘We’re not journalists,’ said Al. ‘We have no idea …’

  I expected her to add, ‘what we’re doing out here’ or ‘how to get back’ but she just left it hanging.

  ■

  I suppose it’s fairly obvious by this point that the real point of Al’s and my Great American Road Trip was to figure out whether we should drift along together some more or let ourselves drift apart. I was never jealous and even now I’ve never felt more than a certain retrospective regret. A slight propensity to glance over the shoulder and wonder what might have been. I never let myself think that Al actually loved me.

  Nevertheless, despite my non-jealous nature, having left Jean and Joan and trekked through the scrub to Zeke’s earthship and having got my first glimpse of Zeke, my first thought was that he looked exactly how I imagined the teepee guy Jez.

  Given the later history of Zeke and Al, it would be good to report some kind of spark passing between them at this point, a recognition of something or other. But there wasn’t anything like that. A tall, lean, grey-ponytailed guy with a moustache looked us over.

  ‘You got stuck?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ I said.

  ‘I go into town Fridays, if you can wait that long.’

  It was Tuesday.

  ‘Friday’s fine,’ said Al.

  Zeke nodded and turned back into the long cool room. ‘Make yourselves at home.’

  ■

  Zeke’s earthship was different from the others. It was bigger, older (as he told us), and set apart from them in the head of a ravine that dropped down to the river. Unlike the others, it had been constructed inside a kind of concrete envelope which had either been built in the ravine where its weight had forced the loose dirt to subside or poured into some kind of mould. Either way, Zeke’s earthship rested inside a kind of concrete ‘hull’. We settled on facing couches and looked out the wall of glass. To the north, I noticed a cloud in the hitherto cloudless sky.