Pacific Edge

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Our latest expedition was to a garden party. Ah yes, I thought: country culture. A pastoral Proustian affair, drinks in the topiary, flower-beds and hedges, perhaps even a maze. Nadezhda and I biked over together, me dressed in colonial whites, trundling along with other cyclists gazelling by me on both sides, and Nadezhda in a flower print dress which constantly threatened to get caught in the spokes of her bike.

  We were greeted at the door of the Sanchez’s big communal house by our hostess Ramona Sanchez, who was dressed in her usual outfit of gym shorts and a T-shirt, plus giant canvas gardening gloves. Yes, this was a garden party; meaning we all were supposed to go out and work in the garden.

  So I spent the better part of an afternoon sitting in my whites on newly turned earth, making repartee with dissected worms and keeping close track of the progress of my blisters. The only consolations were the beer, Nadezhda’s mordant commentary, muttered to me in delicious counterpoint to her polite public pronouncements, and the sight of Ramona Sanchez’s long and leggy legs. Ramona is the town beauty; she looks like either Ingrid Bergman or Belinda Brav, depending on whether you take my word or Nadezhda’s. Currently she is the focus of a great deal of gossip, as she recently broke up with her long-time mate Alfredo the mayor. My friend Kevin is interested in taking Alfredo’s place, but then so am I—the difference being that Ramona appears to reciprocate some of Kevin’s regard, while for me she has only a disinterested friendliness.

  Though she did join me to weed for a half hour or so. I argued the civil rights of the poor decimated or bimated worms, writhing around us. Ramona assured me in her best biology teacher style that they were beneath pain, and that I would approve the sacrifice when I ate the food that resulted from it. A specialty of the area? I asked, squinting with trepidation. Luckily she only meant the salad.

  Well, you get the idea. It really exists! Arcadia! Bucolica! Marx’s “idiocy of rural life”! I don’t think I truly believed it until now.

  Not that the town is free of trouble! My daily workload reminds me constantly that in fact it exists entangled in intricate webs of law. Their system is a mix, combining a communalism of the Santa Rosa model—land and public utilities owned in common, residents required to do ten hours a week of town work, a couple of town-owned businesses in operation to use all the labor available, that sort of thing—with aspects of the new federal model: residents are taxed more and more heavily as they approach the personal income cap, and they can direct 60 percent of their taxes to whatever services they support the most. Businesses based in town are subject to the same sort of graduated system. I am familiar with much of this from my years in Bishop, which has a similar system. As usual in these set-ups, the town is fairly wealthy, even if it is avoided by businesses looking for the best break possible. From all the income generated, a town share is distributed back out to the citizens, which comes to about twice the national income floor. But people still complain that it isn’t higher. Everyone wants to be a hundred. And here they believe that a properly run town could make everyone hit the cap as a matter of course. Thus there is the kind of intense involvement with town politics typical of these set-ups, government mixed with business mixed with life-styles, etc.

  And so there is also the usual array of Machiavellian battles. Prominent among these at the moment is an attempt by the mayor to appropriate an empty hilltop for his own company’s offices. He’s got at least an even chance of succeeding, I’d say; he appears popular, and people want the town shares larger. Moving Heartech into town would certainly do that, as it’s a very successful medtech company, right at the legal limit for company size.

  The opposition to the mayor comes mainly from Kevin and his friends, and they are getting a quick education, with little or no help from the Green party brass, a fact I find faintly suspicious. Most recently they got the council to order an EIS for the zoning change that would make development possible, and they thought this was a big victory. You see what I mean about naïveté! Naturally the town planner, a functionary of the mayor’s, went out and hired Higgins, Ramirez and Bretner to do the EIS, so we’ll get another LA Special in a few weeks from the infamous HRB, urging the creation of an environment by development as soon as possible. And my friends will learn that an EIS is just one more cannon on the battlefield, to be turned in different directions depending on who holds it. I’m going to take them up to Sally and let her educate them.

  But enough for this time, or too much.

  Do write again. I know it is a lost and dead form of communication, but surely we can say things in correspondence that calls would never allow. As for instance, I miss you. In fact I miss almost all of my life in Chicago, which has disappeared like a long vivid dream. “I feel as if great blocks of my life have broken off and fallen into the sea,” isn’t that how Durrell puts it in the Quartet? I suppose I should consider El Modena my Cycladean isle, removed from the Alexandrian complexities of Chi and my life there; here I can do my work in peace, far from the miseries of the entanglement with E, etc. And there’s something to it. Waking every morning to yet another sunny day, I do feel a Grecian sense of light, of ease. It is no accident that the old real estate hucksters called this coast Mediterranean.

  So, I will sit under my lemon trees, recover, write my reflections on a hillside Venus. Anxiously await your next. Thanks for sending the latest poems as well. You are as clear as Stevens; forge on with that encouragement in mind. Meanwhile I remain,

  Your Oscar

  4

  “Light cracks on the black gloss of the canal, and a gondola oar squeaks under us. Standing on the moonlit bridge, laughing together, listening to the campanile strike midnight, I decide to change Kid Death’s hair from black to red—”

  Something like that. Ah yes—the vibrant author’s journal in The Einstein Intersection, young mind speaking to young mind, brilliant flashes of light in the head. No doubt my image of Europe owes much to it. But what I’ve found … could half a century have changed that much? History, change—rate constants, sure. It feels so much as if things are accelerating. A wind blows through the fabric of time, things change faster than we can imagine. Punctuated equilibrium, without the equilibrium. Hey, Mr. Delany, here I am in Europe writing a book too! But yesterday I spent the morning at the Fremdenkontrolle, arguing in my atrocious German which always makes me feel brain-damaged, getting nowhere. They really are going to kick me out. And in the afternoon I did laundry, running around the building in the rain to the laundry room, Liddy howling upstairs at a banged knee. Last load dry and piled in the red basket, jogging round the front I caught my toe on a board covering the sidewalk next to some street work, fell and spilled clothes all over the mud of the torn-up street. I sat on the curb and almost cried. What happened, Mr. Delany? How come instead of wandering the night canals I’m dumping my laundry in the street? How come when I consider revisions it’s not “change Kid Death’s hair from black to red” but “throw out the first draft and start the whole thing over”?

  And only two weeks before Liddy and I leave.

  What a cheat utopias are, no wonder people hate them. Engineer some fresh start, an island, a new continent, dispossess them, give them a new planet sure! So they don’t have to deal with our history. Ever since More they’ve been doing it: rupture, clean cut, fresh start.

  So the utopias in books are pocket utopias too. Ahistorical, static, why should we read them? They don’t speak to us trapped in this world as we are, we look at them in the same way we look at the pretty inside of a paperweight, snow drifting down, so what? It may be nice but we’re stuck here and no one’s going to give us a fresh start, we have to deal with history as it stands, no freer than a wedge in a crack.

  Stuck in history like a wedge in a crack

  With no way out and no way back—

  Split the world!

  Must redefine utopia. It isn’t the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utop
ia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.

  Compare it to the present course of history. If you can.

  * * *

  One Saturday morning before dawn, Kevin, Doris, and Oscar biked down to the Newport Freeway, shivering in chill wet air. They checked out a car from a sleepy state worker and took off.

  The freeway was dead at that hour, in all lanes. Quickly they hummed up to the car’s maximum speed, in this case about sixty miles an hour. “Another piece of shit,” Doris said. Kevin yawned; traveling in cars always made him sleepy. Doris complained about the smell, opening the windows and cursing the previous users.

  “Spoken like a solid citizen,” Oscar said.

  She gave him an ugly look and stared out the window.

  Hum of the motor, whirr of the tires, whoosh of the cool air. Finally Doris rolled the windows up. Kevin fell asleep.

  They took the Riverside Freeway up the Santa Ana Canyon, passing under huge live oak trees on the big canyon floor. In Riverside they switched to highway 395 and headed north, up California’s back side.

  The sun rose as they traveled over the high desert north of Riverside. Long shadows striped the bare harsh land. Here and there in the distance they spotted knots of date palms and cottonwoods. These oases marked the sites of new villages, scattered in rings around the towns of Hisperia, Lancaster, Victorville. None of these villages were big, but taken together they accounted for a percentage of the diaspora out of the LA basin. You could say that “Greater Los Angeles” now extended out across the Mojave, making possible a much reduced density—even some open land—in the heart of the old monster itself.

  Kevin woke up. “How do you know this Sally Tallhawk?” he asked Oscar.

  “She was one of my teachers in law school.”

  “So you haven’t seen her for a while?”

  “Actually we get together pretty frequently. We have a good time.”

  “Uh huh. And she’s on the state water board?”

  “She was. She just left it. But she knows everyone on it, and she knows everything we might need to know about California water law. And it’s the state laws that determine what the towns can or cannot do, when it comes to water usage.”

  “You aren’t kidding—I hear that all the time when I try to get building permits.”

  “Well, you can see why it has to be that way—water is a regional concern. When towns had control over water there were some horrible local fights.”

  “Still are, as far as I can tell.”

  The country they were crossing got higher, wilder. To their left the Sierra Nevada’s eastern escarpment jumped ten thousand feet into the sky. To their right lower ranges, the Slate and the Panamint, and then the White Mountains, rose burnt and bare. They passed Owens Lake, a sky-colored expanse with a crusty white border, and were in Owens Valley.

  High and narrow, tucked between two of the tallest ranges on the continent, Owens Valley was a riot of spring color. Orchards made a patchwork of the valley floor (apples, almonds, cherries, pears), and many of the trees were in bloom, each branch thick with blossoms, every tree a hallucinatory burst of white or pink. Behind them stood wild slopes of granite and evergreen.

  They passed Lone Pine, the largest town in the valley at almost a hundred thousand people. Beyond Lone Pine they tracked through the strange tortured shapes of the Alabama Hills, some of the oldest rock in North America. After Independence, another big town, they came to Bishop, the cultural center of the valley.

  The main street of Bishop, which was simply highway 395 itself, formed the town’s “historic district.” Kevin laughed to see it: an old Western drive-thru town, composed of motels, Greyhound bus stations, drive-in food stops, steak restaurants, auto parts shops, hardware stores, pharmacies, the rest of the usual selection. Bishop clearly treasured it.

  Away from Main Street the town had been transformed: sixty thousand people lived in some of the most elegant examples of the new architecture Kevin had ever seen, as well as some of the most bizarre. In the northwest quarter of town sprawled the University of California campus. After they dropped off their car at the depot, the three travelers walked over to it.

  The land at the university had been donated partly by the city of Los Angeles, partly by the Bishop reservation of the Paiute and Shoshone Indians. The buildings imitated the local landscape: two rows of tall concrete buildings stood like mountain ranges, over low wooden structures tucked among a great number of pines. They found a map of the campus along one walkway, located Kroeber College and walked to it, passing groups of students sitting on the grass, eating lunch.

  Before some low wooden offices Oscar stopped them and pointed to a woman sitting in the sun, eyes closed. “That’s Sally Tallhawk.”

  She was in fact tall, but not particularly hawkish—she had the broad face of the Paiutes, with thick black eyebrows. She wore a long-sleeved shirt (sleeves rolled up onto big biceps), jeans, and running shoes. A small pair of gold-rimmed bifocals made her seem quite professorial.

  She heard their approach, rose to greet them. “Hey, Rhino,” she said to Oscar easily, and they shook hands left-handed. Oscar introduced Kevin and Doris, and she welcomed them to Bishop. Her voice was low and rapid. “Look here,” she said, “I’m off to the mountains, I was just about to leave.”

  “But we came all this way to talk to you!” Oscar exclaimed. “And we have the festival games tomorrow night.”

  “It’s just an overnighter I have in mind,” she said. “I want to check snow levels in Dusy Basin. I can get you folks all the equipment you need from the department, and you can come along.” Imperiously she quelled Oscar’s protest: “I’m going up into the mountains, I say! If you want to talk to me you’ll have to come along!”

  * * *

  So they did. An hour later they were at the trailhead at South Lake, putting packs on their backs. And then they were hiking, up onto the wild sides of California’s great backbone. Kevin and Doris glanced at Oscar, then at each other. How would Oscar handle the hard work of hiking?

  As it turned out he toiled upward without complaint, sweating, heaving for breath, rolling his eyes behind Tallhawk’s back; but listening intently to her when she spoke. Occasionally he looked at Kevin and Doris, to make sure they could hear, to make sure they were enjoying themselves. They had never seen him so solicitous. The work itself didn’t seem to bother him much at all. And yet Sally Tallhawk was leading them at a rapid pace.

  After two or three hours they rose out of the pine forest, into a mixed zone where patches of dark green lodgepole pine stood here and there, among humps of bare dark red granite. They came to the shores of a long island-filled lake, and hiked around it. Snow patches dotted the north faces of the peaks that towered around them, and white reflections shimmered in the dark blue water.

  “You see how much water pours down into Owens Valley,” Tallhawk said, waving a wide hand, wiping sweat from one eye. “And yet under the old laws, all of it could be piped away to Los Angeles.”

  As they hiked she told the old story, of how the LA Department of Water and Power had obtained the water rights for all the streams falling out of the east side of the Sierra into Owens Valley—in effect draining the yearly snowfall of the watershed off to LA.

  “Criminals,” Doris said, disgusted. “Where were their values?”

  “In growth,” Oscar murmured.

  There had been a man working for the Federal Bureau of Reclamation, Sally said, making a survey of the valley’s water resources. At the same time he was being paid as a consultant by LA, and he passed along everything he learned to LA, so that they knew which streams to gain the rights to. And so Owens Valley was sucked dry, its farms and orchards destroyed. The farmers went out of business and LA bought up their land. Owens Lake dried up completely, and Mono Lake came close, and the groundwater level fell and fell, until even the desert plants began to die.
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  “I can’t believe they could get away with it!” Doris said.

  Tallhawk only laughed. “They ended up with the peculiar situation of a city in one county being the major landowner in another county. This was so disturbing that laws were passed in Sacramento to make any repetition of that kind of ownership impossible. But it was too late for Owens Valley.”

  Telling this story took a while. By the time Tallhawk was done they were above Long Lake, into wild, rocky territory, where the ponds were small, and bluer than seemed possible. Shadows were cast far to the left, toward a jagged skyline Sally identified as the Inconsolable Range. Oscar huffed and puffed, showing a surprising endurance. They were all in a rhythm, walking in a little line—a little line of tiny figures, hiking across a landscape of blasted stone, dwarfed by the huge bare mountains that now surrounded them on three sides.

  The trail wound over a knob called Saddlerock, then turned left, up a monstrous trench in the Inconsolable Range. They were in shadow now, and the scattered junipers with their gnarled cinnamon branches and dusky green needles seemed like sentient things, huddled together to watch them pass.

  They started up an endless series of switchbacks that ascended the right wall of the enormous trench, stomping through snow more and more often as they got higher. Tallhawk pounded up the trail at a steady pace, and they rose so quickly they could pop their ears. Eventually the trail was completely filled with snow, tromped down by previous hikers. At times they looked back down at the route they had taken, at a long string of lakes in late afternoon shadow; then the trail would switch back, and they stared directly across at the sharktooth edge of the Inconsolable Range, rising to the massive pyramid of Mount Agassiz. They were far above treeline now, it was nothing but rock and snow.