Lane Change Avoiding the Harbor
A curious moment of stasis was achieved. Not simply a rest or even a coda, but stasis. Manzanar could liken it to a crossover—the pianist’s hand flowing to its destination on the opposite end of the keyboard in one breathless extending and endless motion like changing lanes, straddling the dividing line for a sweet, wistful pause before some rude awakening. Driving in darkness heightened the quality of the effect: the searching distance of headlights spilling across the highway, dimmed to hazy star-points by adjustable rearview mirrors, following the glowing cinder of taillights, phosphorescent dashboards, and the tiny immutable interior beacon within one’s mind focused on a distant point, a question mark, a destination.
Upon these matters Manzanar pondered through the warm night, gazing over the strange encampment below his perch—a trailer park akin only to a giant Arizona swap meet. TV and LAPD choppers hovered—dark angels sweeping their giant flashlights across the unpredictable terrain. Lights flickered within the cars like campfires, flickering out as batteries died. Some had managed to jumpstart the cars, revving engines, now puffing warm exhaust into the night air.
The ability to move forward or backwards was minimal. During the day, attempts were made to achieve a different parking angle; an off-roadie had pulled itself up into the ice plants. A closer proximity allowed for jump-starting with the singular advantage of operating the electrical system, of tuning radios and running interior lights and, for that matter, headlights, taillights, and turn signals for whatever good reason. There was, too, the possibility of playing CDs and tapes ransacked from glove compartments. For the second night in a row, Manzanar could see the terror reflected in the faces of people huddled in a dark van attentively listening to all twenty-four ninety-minute cassettes of a Stephen King novel narrated for Books-on-Tape.
Speculations arose as to how much fuel was required to keep an idling engine idling. How much rev to keep a battery alive. For the most part, however, energy was a minor concern, especially to those who were usually without such a luxury. Only the NewsNow van caught in the middle of this Sig disaster anxiously pondered, at the end of the day, the demise of its minicam batteries and the gas indicator closing on E. Maybe someone would syphon the gas in their station wagon in return for fifteen seconds live on the air. To lose even a minute of this event would be tantamount to a transmission failure during crucial testimony in the O.J. or Menendez trials. The NewsNow reporters hunkered down like correspondents in a dugout in Bosnia-Herzegovina, occasionally wandering out to interview someone trading a shopping cart for a Volvo, carefully exchanging the contents of one for the other, eating the earthquake supplies, tossing out curious items like 3½" diskettes, mug warmers, and copies of Buzz.
“Why are you throwing that out?”
“You want it?”
“What do you think it is?” the reporter asks.
“Beats me.”
This long moment of stasis allowed Manzanar to drop his arms, to peel himself away from his performance, his music. It was like an out-of-body experience, better understood perhaps on an overpass in Santa Monica rather than against this rational downtown backdrop of business, bureaucracy, banking, insurance, and security exchange. However, he stood beside himself under a summer moon and saw the man he had become over the years: a strange disheveled grizzled white-haired beast of a man wielding a silver baton. The past flooded around him in great murky swirls. For a moment, he saw his childhood in the desert between Lone Pine and Independence, the stubble of manzanita and the snow-covered Sierras against azure skies. He remembered his youth, the woman he loved, the family he once had, a nine-year-old grandchild he was particularly fond of. He remembered his practice, his patients, his friends. Curiously. He remembered. The past spread out like a great starry fan and then folded in upon itself.
Encroaching on this vision was a larger one: the great Pacific stretching along its great rim, brimming over long coastal shores from one hemisphere to the other. And there were the names of places he had never seen, from the southernmost tip of Chile to the Galapagos, skirting the tiny waist of land at Panama, up Baja to Big Sur to Vancouver, around the Aleutians to the Bering Strait. From the North, that peaceful ocean swept from Vladivostok around the Japan Isles and the Korean Peninsula, to Shanghai, Taipei, Ho Chi Minh City, through a thousand islands of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Micronesia, sweeping about that giant named Australia and her sister, New Zealand. Manzanar looked out on this strange end and beginning: the very last point West, and after that it was all East. The inky waves with their moonlit spume stuttering against the shore seemed to speak this very truth—garbage jettisoned back prohibiting further progress.
And there was the great land mass to the south, the southern continent and the central Americas. Everything was for a brief moment fixed. Fixed as they had supposedly always been. Of course, with continental drift, the changing crust of Earth’s surface had over billions of years come to this, cracked into continents, spread apart by large bodies of water. Now human civilization covered everything in layers, generations of building upon building upon building the residue, burial sites, and garbage that defined people after people for centuries. Manzanar saw it, but darkly, before it would shift irrevocably, crush itself into every pocket and crevice, filling a northern vacuum with its cultural conflicts, political disruption, romantic language, with its one hundred years of solitude and its tropical sadness.
But for the moment, a strange peace settled over the city. During the day, the AQMD gave updated reports on air quality; citizens wondered how they were supposed to get through the day without breathing. Caltrans trucks with their giant blinking indicator arrows trundled along the shoulders, oblivious as always to any confusion they might cause. Little men in fluorescent orange suits poked along the ivy and oleander for trash. Convicted taggers did social service, sluggishly painting over graffiti. Mild excitement was created over the discovery of an old Chaka tag hidden all these years by climbing ivy. Some kids ran over to palpate the peeling Krylon as if it were an Egyptian hieroglyph. The MTD rerouted itself across the landscape, avoiding the Harbor, tooling down parallel corridors, down Fig or Vermont. Some folks even used the Blue Line. SigAlerts continued: the usual big-rig wrecks on right shoulders, over center dividers, two-car collisions, stalled vehicles, spilled contents, slowing traffic southbound, north-bound, eastbound, westbound.
At sundown, Manzanar had recognized the motorcyclist in a pink suit and pink helmet—a regular on this freeway—wending her way between lanes, waving and throwing kisses to the new occupants of hundreds of stalled vehicles. She was followed by Hell’s Angels and Heaven’s Devils and a rubbie or two in leather on Harleys, scouting the scene first hand, come to share a beer at the Bud truck. Two lovers had wandered down on foot; they cuddled together in a convertible Mustang tucked behind a Greyhound bus. Oblivious to the world, only their passion engulfed them.
Manzanar’s hand had lifted the great billows of smoke in sharps and flats, luminous clouds tinged with the fading sunset, casting beautiful shadows against the tall glass structures. Darkness followed with artless dissonance. Propellers chopped the night, their thunder following searchlights striking without discrimination. And now the great fires burned clean blue flames at either end of this dark stretch of freeway.