The Gold Coast: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  How did it get this way?

  Well, it’s a starting point. A Newport Freeway. You can get anywhere from the Newport Freeway.…

  52

  How did it happen?

  It was World War Two that began the change, World War Two that set the pattern.

  After Pearl Harbor the two thousand Orange County citizens of Japanese origin were gathered up and relocated in a shabby desert camp in Poston, Arizona. And people poured west to wage war. President Roosevelt called for the construction of fifty thousand planes a year, and the little airplane factories in Los Angeles and Orange had room to grow, they had empty farmland around them, every one. Thus the aeronautics industry in southern California had its start.

  And the soldiers and sailors came west. They saw Orange County, and it looked just like the labels on the orange crates back home: the broad flat plain, covered with orange trees in their symmetrical rows; long lines of towering eucalyptus trees breaking the land into immense squares; the bare foothills behind, and the snowy mountains behind them; the wide, sandy, empty beaches down at Newport and Corona del Mar; the little bungalows tucked in their gardens, under the grapevine bowers, nestled each in an orange grove all its own.

  There were only a hundred and thirty thousand people in all the county, lost in the millions of trees. City boys from the East, farmers from the cold Midwest and the poor South, all children of the Depression—they came out and saw the dream, the Mediterranean vision of a rich and easeful agricultural life, under an eternal sun. They went to the beach on Christmas day. They laughed punch-drunk in warm salt waves. They drove old Fords down the country roads, flashing through the ranked shadows of the eucalyptus trees, drinking beer and laughing with local girls and breathing in the thick scent of the orange blossoms, in the bright sun of February. And they said: When this war is over, I’m coming back here to make my home.

  There was land, empty farmland, that the military could use. And people were happy to see the military there, it meant good business. Patriotism, good business: the equation took root in Orange County, beginning with this war. The Santa Ana City Council, for instance, rented four hundred acres of the Berry ranch, for $6,386 a year, then turned around and rented the land to the War Department for a dollar a year, inviting the department to use the land for whatever they liked. It was patriotic, it was good business. The War Department made the ranch into the Santa Ana Army Air Base, and through the war 110,000 men trained there. They saw the land.

  Next to the air base was established the Army Air Forces Flying Training Command, the “University of the Air.” Sixty-six thousand pilots got their wings there. They all saw the land.

  The Navy established one U.S. Naval Air Station at Los Alamitos, and another in Tustin, to house its blimps. It dredged the harbor at Seal Beach, and relocated two thousand residents, and established the U.S. Naval Ammunition and Net Depot, at a cost of $17 million—all of it paid to the local construction industry.

  Groves in El Toro were torn out to make room for the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station, El Toro, one of the biggest in the country.

  Orange County Airport became the Santa Ana Army Airdrome. Irvine Park became Camp George E. Rathke, infantry training center. And through all of these military bases poured the men, and the money.

  So much of the population was directed to the war effort that not enough were left over to farm. Mexican braceros were brought in to pick the oranges. German POWs were brought in to pick the oranges. A group of Jamaicans were brought in to pick the oranges. (“These Negroes have Oxford accents!” a resident said.)

  But the soldiers, the sailors, the fliers, the airplane factory workers, they all served the war. Orange County became part of a war machine; and this military-industrial infrastructure was built, and left in place, and it provided work for the thousands of men who returned after the war, with their new families; they came, and bought houses built by the construction industry that had been so well primed by military construction, and they went to work. In the 1950s the Santa Ana Freeway was extended down into Orange County from Los Angeles, and then you could work in L.A. but live in Orange County; like the coming of the railroad, like all the other improvements in the efficiency of transportation, it fueled the boom, and the military-industrial machine grew again. And so the machine served the Korean War, and the Cold War, and the Vietnam War, and the Cold War, and the Central American War, and the Cold War, and the African War, and the Cold War, and the Indonesian War, and the Cold War, and the Space War … a war machine, ever growing.

  And none of that ever went away.

  53

  Sandy’s return from Europe is a bit hectic. His answering machine goes on for two and a half hours, at a minute maximum per message. It seems that half the messages are from Bob Tompkins, too. So he calls Bob. “Hi, Bob, Sandy here.”

  “Ah, Sandy! You’re back!”

  “Yeah, I decided to, to—”

  “To let things cool down a little, eh Sandy? Well, it worked.”

  Bob laughs, and Sandy nods to himself. It did indeed work. Talking to Bob on the day he got the news would have been blistering.

  “You shouldn’t worry so much about things, Sandy. I mean when I first got your message I was upset, sure, but it didn’t take me a week to get over it, for Christ’s sake! I mean when you’ve got the Coast Guard breathing down your neck, what else can you do? You could have dumped those barrels over the side, right? So just the fact that we might be able to recover them is a big plus. Listen, if you can liberate that stuff, there’ll be a bonus in it for you, for duty above and beyond the call.”

  “That’s great, Bob, I’m glad you feel that way about it. But there’s a certain problem with where we stashed the stuff. We just picked the nearest isolated spot on the coast, you know, and dumped them in a bunch of boulders. But then we noticed that the buildings for Laguna Space Research were on the top of the bluff above us. And they’ve just announced an increase in security around their facility, because of the recent sabotages. Including a watch against boats landing.”

  “Ah ha. That is a problem. So … this company is a defense contractor, then?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I see.” Long pause. “Okay, well listen Sandy, we’ll have to figure something out to help you, then. I’ll get back to you on this, okay? Meanwhile just let it ride.”

  Fine with Sandy. He’s free to concentrate on some heavy-duty dealing. He’s got quite a bit of ground to make up, and so for the next few days he goes into overdrive, working sixteen, sometimes eighteen hours each day, to the point where he has to put some serious effort into supply as well as sales. Angela, who sees the need, is doing overtime herself taking care of him and the ap and their meals and the nightly party, which has regained its momentum in the days since their return. The constant running around in traffic, keeping track of handshake deals, doing the bookkeeping in the head, all over a ground base of massive drug intake, is exhausting in the extreme. In fact he’s finding it hard to come home at night and really enjoy the party.

  “Wow, burnout,” he says to Angela.

  “Why don’t you take tomorrow night off. In the long run it’ll help you keep this pace.”

  “Good idea.”

  So the next night he comes home early, around eleven, and corrals Abe, Tashi, and Jim. “Hey you guys, let’s cruise.”

  The others like the idea. They get in Sandy’s big car and track onto Newport Freeway north. Sandy programs a loop into the car: Newport Freeway north, Riverside west, Orange south, Garden Grove east, and then north on the Newport again: it’s upper level all the way in each of these directions, so that it’s like going for a little plane ride on autopia, with the great lightshow and all the other cars and their passengers for entertainment.

  They started doing this together on the wrestling team, when they first got driver’s licenses. Starving and thirsty high school kids, trying to make weight, or celebrating the end of the weekly necessity to make weight by pigging out.… To
night there’s a strongly nostalgic feeling about it; they’re cruising the freeways, a basic OC activity. How could they have lost the habit?

  Sandy is driving, Abe’s in the front passenger seat, Jim is behind Abe, Tash behind Sandy. The first order of business is to deploy a few eyedroppers, in fact there’s a sort of synergistic capacity upgrade when these four get together like this, and they really drown their eyes, according to long-standing tradition.

  “Nothing like coming down to the old club and settling in,” Jim says blissfully. “The lightshow is good tonight, isn’t it? Look there, you can see in the pattern of the streetlights, the original plattings for the first towns in the area. See the really tight squares of streetlights are the oldest towns, when the platting was into really small blocks. There’s Fullerton … there’s Anaheim, the oldest … pretty soon we’ll see Orange … and in between the pattern stretches way out, see? Longer blocks and twisty housing tracts.”

  “Yeah, I see it!” Sandy says, surprised. “I never noticed that before, but it’s there.”

  “Yep,” Jim says, proudly. He goes rattling on about real estate history, which his employer First American Title Insurance and Real Estate has all the records for; then about First American and Humphrey’s attempt to build his office building on the land of the dismembered Cleveland National Forest; then about a new computer system that the company has installed in the offices, very advanced, “I mean you really can talk to it, not just simple commands but really complicated stuff, it’s like the real beginning of the man-computer interface, and it’s really going to mean a lot for,” and then suddenly all three of his friends have turned to stare Jim in the face.

  He comes to a halt and Sandy giggles. Abe, shaking his head, says in a pitying, exasperated voice: “Jim, no one gives a fuck about computers.”

  “Ah. Yes. Well. You know.” And Jim starts to giggle himself. Must have been an eyedropper of Funny Bone, that last unmarked one.

  Abe is pointing down at the Orange Mall. “Sandy, did you ever tell these guys about the time we were in the parking garage there?”

  “No, don’t think I did,” Sandy says, grinning.

  Abe turns to the two in the backseat. “We were leaving the mall and driving out of the big parking garage they have, you know, the thirty-story one, and we’re following the arrows down the ramps from floor to floor, and it’s not a simple spiral staircase situation at all, they’ve got it screwed up and you have to go to successive corners of each floor to get down, or something like that. So here we are following the arrows down, and Sandy’s eyes do their bug-out-of-his-head thing, you know?”

  Tashi and Jim nod, imitating the look in tandem.

  “Exactly.” Abe laughs. “And he says, ‘You know, Abraham, if it weren’t for these arrows…’ and I say uh-huh, yeah, what? And he says, ‘Stop the car! Wait a minute! Stop the car, I forgot something!’ So I sit there while he goes back in the mall, and then he comes running back out with two big cans of paint—one can white, one a gray the color of the garage floors. And two brushes. ‘We’ll start at the bottom,’ he says, ‘and no one will ever escape.’”

  “Ahhh, hahaha.”

  “The labyrinth without the thread,” Jim says.

  “You aren’t kidding! I mean, think about it! So we drive around and at every arrow Sandy jumps out and quick paints over the old one and puts a new one down, pointing in a new direction—not necessarily the opposite direction, just a new one. And finally we reach the top floor. Already we can hear the honking and the cursing and all from the floors below. And then Sandy turns to me with this puzzled expression, and says, ‘Hey, Abe—how are we going to get out of here?’”

  Sandy’s manic laugh dominates the rest.

  They’re tracking south on the Orange Freeway, coming to the giant interchange with the Santa Ana and the Garden Grove freeways—another immense pretzel of concrete ribbons flying through the air, lightly buttressed on concrete pillars. Their change to the Garden Grove east will take them right through the middle of the knot. Great views over Santa Ana to the south, then Orange to the north; just names in the continuum of the lightshow, but given what Jim has said about the pattern of the streetlights, interesting to observe.

  Tashi rises up like he’s achieved enlightenment, and speaks the message from the cosmos: “There are only four streets in OC.”

  “What?” cries Abe. “Look around you, man!”

  “Platonic forms,” Jim says, understanding. “Ideal types.”

  “Only four.” Tash nods. “First there’s the freeways.”

  “Okay. I’ll grant you that.”

  “Then there’s the commercial streets, big ones with parking lots flanking them and all the businesses behind the parking lots, or on them. Like Tustin Avenue, right down there.” He points north.

  “Or Chapman.” “Or Bristol.” “Or Garbage Grove Boulevard.” “Or Beach.” “Or First.” “Or MacArthur.” “Or Westminster.” “Or Katella.” “Or Harbor.” “Or Brookhurst.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah!” Tashi interrupts them. “Point proven! There are many commercial streets in OC. But they all are one.”

  “I wonder,” Sandy says dreamily, “if you blindfolded someone and spun them around to disorient them, then took off the blindfold somewhere on one of the commercial streets, how long it would take them to identify it?”

  “Forever,” Tash opines. “They’re indistinguishable. I think they made a one-mile unit and then just reproduced it five hundred times.”

  “It would be a challenge,” Sandy muses. “A sort of game.”

  “Not tonight,” Abe says.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “The third kind of street,” Tashi forges on, “is the residential street, class A. The suburban streets of the housing tracts. Please don’t start naming examples, there are ten zillion.”

  “I like the cute curly ones in Mission Viejo,” Sandy says.

  “Or the old cul-de-sac exclusive models,” Jim adds.

  “And the fourth type?” says Abe.

  “Residential street, class B. The urban ap streets, like down there in Santa Ana.”

  “A lot of that’s original platting,” Jim says. “Now it’s as close to slums as we’ve got.”

  “As close to slums?” Abe repeats. “Man, they’re there.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “There’s a fifth kind of street,” Sandy announces.

  “You think so?” Tash asks, interested.

  “Yeah. I guess you could call it the street-freeway. It’s a street, but there’s nothing facing it at all—it’s backed by housing-development walls, mostly, and there’s no shops, no pedestrians—”

  “Well, none of them have pedestrians.”

  “True, but I mean even less than usual. They’re just avenues for tracking fast where there aren’t freeways.”

  “Negative numbers of pedestrians?”

  “Yeah, we use those a lot,” Abe says. “Like Fairhaven, or Olive, or Edinger.”

  “Exactly,” Sandy says.

  “Okay,” Tash agrees. “We’ll make it five. There are five streets in OC.”

  “Do you think it’s because of zoning laws?” Jim asks. “I mean, why is that?”

  “More use habits than zoning, I’d bet,” Tash says. “Stores like to be together, housing developments are built in group lots, that kind of thing.”

  “Each street has a history,” Jim says, staring out the window with his mouth hanging open. “My God!”

  “Better get writing, Jim.…”

  “Speaking of streets and history,” Sandy says, “I was driving east on the Garden Grove on a really clear morning a few weeks ago, first morning of a Santa Ana wind, you know? You could see Baldy and Arrowhead and everything. And the sun was just up, and I looked north to where the old Orange Plaza used to be—a little west of that, I’d guess. And I couldn’t believe my eyes! I mean, down there I suddenly saw this street that I’d never seen before, and it had rea
lly tall skinny palm trees on one side of it, and the street surface was like white concrete, wider than usual, and the houses on each side were solo houses with yards, little bungalows with enclosed porches and grass lawns, and sidewalks and everything! I mean it was like one of those old photos from the 1930s or something!”

  Jim is bouncing in his seat with excitement, leaning over into the front. “Where, where, where, where!”

  “Well, that’s the thing—I don’t know! I was so surprised that I got off at the next exit and tracked on over to take a look for it. I thought you’d be interested, and I even thought I might want to buy a house there if I could, it looked so … So I tracked around for about a half hour looking for it, and I couldn’t find it! Couldn’t even find the palm trees! Since then every time I drive that stretch I look for it, but it just isn’t there.”

  “Whoah.”

  “Heavy.”

  “I know. I figure it had something to do with the light or something. Or maybe a time warp.…”

  “Oh, man.” Jim hops up and down on his seat, thinking about it. “I want to find that.”

  They track some more. In the cars around them other people live their lives. Occasionally they track by freeway parties, several cars hooked together, people passing things between them, music all the same from every car.

  “Let’s fuel up,” Tashi says. “I’m hungry.”

  “Let’s swing into one of the drive-thrus,” Sandy says, “so we don’t have to leave the loop. Which shall it be?”

  “Jack-in-the-Box,” says Abe.

  “McDonald’s,” says Jim.

  “Burger King,” says Tashi.

  “Which one?” Sandy shouts as they pass one of the drive-thru complex offramps. The others all shout their choices and Tash reaches over Sandy’s shoulder for the steering switch. Abe and Jim grab his arm and try to move it, and the struggle begins. Shouts, curses, wrestling holds, karate chops: finally Sandy cries, “Taste test! Taste test!” The others subside. “We’ll try all of them.”