Chapter 6. Roadwork
His iron habit was to have dinner at Stirling’s while there was still plenty of daylight, always the Boca Burger with fries. Then he would roll leisurely out to the desert, watching the lengthening rays of the sun slant across the sage toward the Craters, and pull off onto one of the four-wheel-drive roads that snaked across the gray volcanic ash, looking for the little turnout that marked his usual campsite, hidden in the sage, with its view downslope to the lake and across to the sawtooth Sierra on the west and to the softer shapes of the Craters to the south.
He always performed the ritual in the same sequence. He drove with some trepidation down the long slope from the north, alert to this year’s alterations in the landscape and the town of Mildred: new or renovated restaurants or B&Bs, gleaming condos perched on the cliffs overlooking the lake, a new Best Western motel. Even a repainting of the lines on the highway could darken his mood, implying that other people intended to drive this road and thus heralding an increased flux of BMWs from LA and German tourists in, like himself, rented cars.
But the RV park at least was fairly dependable (although this year they had upgraded their bathhouse with a whole new set of restrooms and more shower stalls): he could buy his token (up 25 cents from last year) from the lady in the trailer office and get his five-minute hot shower, afterwards sitting on the bench under the cottonwoods to dry between his toes with luxurious calm, while the cool wind began its evening rush down into the basin. Then on to Stirling’s, the Boca Burger, lots of water, the same waitresses just a year older (although sometimes there was an unfamiliar face or one of them had disappeared). Afterwards he drove south, past the PetroMall that, to his dismay, had materialized a couple of years ago, then east on highway 62 and into the desert for a solitary night under the stars. They at least were absolutely changeless; he could count on seeing the Swan gliding down the Milky Way every year, even though there was generally some brash planet or other thrown into the mix, a suspended chord in the music of the spheres.
He had done something like this every year for a decade, once he had discovered the homely charm of this part of the world. Packing into the Sierra canyons to camp in the truly lonely places, was getting to be too strenuous; sometimes he felt the true solitude you could earn that way was not quite worth the agony of hauling a backpack 10 miles and two or three thousand feet up into the high country. But this was easy, and this mild desert had never failed him, aside from a few flies and, one night, spatters of rain. He thought he could continue to make this pilgrimage until he was 80 or even beyond. Often he made the trip in late August, as a final summer excursion, which added to its poignancy.
This year, however, he found that something really bad had happened. The California Transportation Department had determined somehow that it was necessary to widen the highway south of Mildred. There had appeared, suddenly and horribly, a whole complex of embankments, drainage ditches, bridges faced in faux stone, a dusty median trough at least 100 feet wide, and two new lanes of highway, freshly blacktopped, laid like a whip across the rolling flats and washes of the basin floor.
What the hell are they thinking about? he wondered, as he drove slowly beside this outrage, which was not yet open to traffic. There were already four lanes of highway along most of this stretch, although without any median; we can’t use the lanes that are already there, at least convert them into a new median? No, we have to add this enormous median AND another two lanes, WITH their damn shoulders and their drainage ditches. They had at least tripled the width of the existing highway, a road that he had never seen crowded, not even at the height of the summer tourist season. Although no one was actually working at this time of day, the earthmovers and trucks and rollers and watering vehicles lolled like huge, callous beasts along the margins of the gash they’d ripped into his frail desert, resting up for another day of mayhem.
The drive eastward across the sagebrush flats after the turnoff soothed him somewhat, as there were at least no visible changes in the landscape. The two-lane road (a large sign announced that it was not plowed in winter) curved up over a saddle between two gray volcanic cones and then wound down toward the lake. He passed one car in the whole five miles, doubtless hurrying to reach the Best Western before darkness fell. His little road was still open, with its “4-wheel-drive vehicles only” sign, which he ignored as usual, and pulling into the little turnout he noted with satisfaction that there were no tracks in it, of either vehicle or human being. Perhaps no one had even set foot on the ground here since he had left last August. And why would they, after all? No Best Western, no hot tubs, no gourmet meals, no gift shops, Yosemite t-shirts, RV toilet dump sites. Just the expectant silence of the desert twilight, the earth-and-sky tinted lake with its islands like drowsing animals, the Sierra front that hadn’t changed since the glaciers retreated.
He found a broad enough clearing between the sage clusters to pitch his sage-colored tent. The sandy gray floor was covered with the dried stems of what he had seen, one June, as a pink fog of tiny flowers blanketing the ground. The heat of July and August had ended their blooming, but he knew from having accidentally knocked over a couple while setting up the tent that their roots were still moist.
He placed the tent with its door facing east, so he would be awakened by the predawn glow. It was dark now, and stars were beginning to poke through the deepening blue of the sky. A gang of coyotes began yipping and wailing in the distance. He threw his sleeping bag and pad into the tent, along with a flashlight and sweatpants. Then he brushed his teeth, facing the lake as he visualized and attended to all the dental crevices and crannies. He rinsed the toothbrush with water from a plastic bottle, locked the car, and wandered a few yards away from the tent for a last pee. The coyotes had subsided. All was still, except for the splatter of urine onto the sand.
Zipped into the tent, with his head toward the door, he could see the three bright stars of the Summer Triangle through the mosquito net. A good night for sleeping, he thought. His wandering mind kept butting up against the vision of that arrogant new rift of highway, with its entourage of crouching earthmovers. Nevertheless, he fell asleep before too long.
He awoke, an unknown amount of time later, to the sound of stealthy footsteps outside the tent. He could hardly even class the noises as footfalls; there was just a light, rhythmic crunching and scrabbling in the pebbly sand, seemingly a few feet from the tent. The back of his neck began to tingle, and then his whole scalp. He thought immediately of the coyotes. He knew, in a theoretical way, that they were too small and timid to be any real threat to human beings; but how about a whole pack of them, maddened by his incursion into their domain and emboldened by his solitariness, out here a good ten miles from the Best Western? He had a brief vision of them bursting through the frail walls of the tent from all sides, slashing diagonally with their jaws to open the longest possible wounds all over his body.
At some point in every one of these trips he was assailed by the basic idiocy of camping. Sixty years old, a wife sleeping peacefully in San Francisco with a cat on her hip, a respectable job, reasonable finances and the prospect of a comfortable if not affluent retirement, and here he was lying out alone on an air mattress that wasn’t really thick enough, in a plastic house, with cold desert air pouring through its ridiculous flap and over his bald head, surrounded by a pack of hostile predators. The crunching of sand continued, discreet but insistent, amplified by the surrounding silence. He listened to it for a minute or two, eyes staring into the darkness, but the sound neither approached nor retreated.
It’s just the two in the morning heebie jeebies, he told himself. Don’t be ridiculous. There’s nothing out here that can hurt you. Just get up and scare them away. But he found himself reluctant to open the tent and step out into the darkness, where his blindness would give his invisible enemies the advantage. Instead, he rolled over onto his stomach and strained his eyes to see through the mosquito net door
of the tent. “What are you doing out there,” he asked, trying to put an amiable tone into his voice. “What’s going on?” He would have expected the coyotes to at least stop and listen briefly, but the scratching and crunching continued without pause. He felt along the side of the tent, first for his glasses and then for the flashlight, which he turned on, directing it out the door, but of course this made only the netting itself visible. There was nothing for it but to zip open the bottom corner of the flap, stick his arm out through the opening, and shine the light around in all directions. The crunching stopped, but there were no sounds of flight and he couldn’t see any glowing eyes or shadowy shapes. He pulled his arm back in and switched off the flashlight, then lay on his back listening. The crunching noises started up again after a few moments, but for some reason the coyote threat now seemed less real. The scratching didn’t really sound like footsteps at all. It was more of a digging or nibbling sound, he decided. Probably a rodent of some kind, or a maybe a raccoon? No, not out here. A mouse or a packrat or something like that.
He tried again. “What are you up to?” The scratching or digging, whatever it was, continued. It’s only a mouse, he thought, although a curiously unresponsive one. The thing to do is just ignore it, go back to sleep. It’ll get tired eventually, or else finish whatever it’s doing. He took off his glasses and replaced them carefully along the side of the tent, then rolled onto his aching hip on the too-thin mat and tried to go back to sleep. Possibly he succeeded, but he woke up again with a start, probably only a minute or two later. The scratching noises were quite loud now. They seemed to be right below his ear; in fact, he thought he could feel the tent fabric itself vibrating slightly. Something was burrowing right under the damn tent. He wondered if he had thoughtlessly pitched his tent over the animal’s home, and it was trying to create a new access through this unexpected obstacle. Perhaps whatever it was was nibbling on the tent itself, and he would wake up in the morning to find holes eaten into the floor. Also, there was bubonic plague out here. All the campgrounds had warnings about feeding the ground squirrels and chipmunks, and about camping near their burrows. I’ve got to scare this thing off, he decided. He rolled over onto his stomach again and whacked the tent floor hard, yelling “Hey!” at the same time. The noises stopped. He listened for a while, but all was silent. However, as soon as he rolled onto his other side and tried to go back to sleep, the crunching started again, right under his ear.
“All right, god damn it. I can make noise, too!” He grabbed his glasses and the flashlight again, zipped open the door flap, and trained the flashlight along the front edge of the tent. Nothing. The thing must be right under the damn tent! He carefully lifted up the edge of the tent and the ground sheet, expecting some lightning little mammal to make a break for it. But the light revealed, instead, an enormous orangeish bug, a couple of inches long, with a big shiny bald sphere for a head. It was motionless in the flashlight beam, as though aware it was being observed by hostile forces. He took off his glasses to get a closer look. He had the momentary hope of saving some face in this ridiculous incident by identifying it at least as a scorpion. It had the right color and semitransparency. But really, it was only a Jerusalem cricket, outsized but harmless. Some unknown substance was clinging to its nether parts. At first he thought it had been injured by his blow to the tent floor and was extruding its bug innards, but it might just have been grains of white sand clinging to the sticky-looking abdomen. Nevertheless, he started feeling guilty. The thing obviously had its own agenda, was just going about its usual nighttime business, and here’s this goddamn tent in its way. Undaunted, single-minded or even less than single-minded, it had determined to dig under the unexpected obstacle and continue on its way.
Now that he’d probably injured it, was he obliged to finish the job, crush it, put it out of its presumed misery? He didn’t like the idea of how much crushing such a large bug might require, and felt squeamish about the volume and quality of stuff that would come out of it. Also, it had started moving again, trying to walk, although with some difficulty. Maybe its situation wasn’t hopeless. He poked gently at it with the flashlight; its own violent reaction flipped it over on its back, where it seemed to be trying to threaten him with its segmented legs. A fearless little thing, he thought. But if I were an owl, I’d just eat you. All your leg-waving wouldn’t make one bit of difference. He rummaged around inside the tent for a paper towel, which he used to try to scoop up the bug. But once again its vigorous reaction startled him; it seized the paper towel and seemed to be trying to run up onto his hand. He flung it reflexively off into the night. It landed several feet from the tent. That wasn’t what he’d had in mind, but it should at least resolve the situation for tonight.
Since he was wide awake and the tent flap was already open, he sat up and put on his sandals, and stepped out onto the sand to empty his irksome bladder once more. The stars were like streetlights, the silence total. The mountains to the west and the much nearer Craters were vague, impassive giants in the darkness. He climbed back into the tent, zipped it shut, replaced the flashlight and his glasses, and tried to go back to sleep. Fifteen minutes later, the crunching started again near his ear.
He rolled onto his back and listened, as he might have listened to a vagrant gust of wind or to raindrops beginning to spatter onto the tent. The damn thing is relentless, he thought. It’s like the telltale heart. He imagined it under the tent, earthmoving, excavating, advancing and retreating, cutting and filling with blind determination, heedless of the hulking catastrophe that was trying to sleep above its bald head. He should get up and resolve the issue once and for all, carry the damn thing 50 yards away. But the midnight lethargy was on him, he just wanted to sleep. Please, please, let me sleep! Why was there always something like this on every camping trip? He sat up, threw his little camp pillow to the other end of the tent, rotated the sleeping bag, and lay down again with his head under the window instead of the door. In this position he was unable to hear anything from the other end of the tent, and he finally fell asleep; only to awaken once more to the scrabbling noises near his ear. This time he merely murmured “Oh no,” drowsily reversed his sleeping bag again, and went back to sleep with his head by the door, awakening only when the glow of the sunrise sky began to light the interior of the tent and the misnamed nighthawks were already creaking and diving above him.
He got up immediately, not wanting to miss the moment when the rim of the sun first appeared above the low eastern hills. It was his last morning in the desert for this year and he wanted to savor it. The high peaks were already pink, and soon the long rays began to touch the tops of the Craters to the south. He had read yesterday, thumbing through one of the books in the visitor center gift shop, that the first of these craters had appeared a mere 35,000 years ago. He wondered what the sunrise would have looked like out here before the eruptions, slanting across a flat, featureless desert. Of course, the basin had been filled by a lake at that time; his campsite had probably been under 100 feet of water. It was a strange thought, not quite graspable. The vertical black arrows of the Jeffrey pines on the gray slopes looked complacent, eternal, and the Craters themselves occupied their posts with complete authority. As usual, he wanted to stay and think it all through. Maybe he could finally flush the ghost of catastrophe that haunted these silent hills, for once actually see the resin of time that encased them. But he was hungry, and the sun, hoisting itself already far above the horizon, was getting hot and casting a less magical light.
He had already removed the sleeping bag and pad, laid them out in the sun, and started to disassemble the tent before he thought to check for the signs of last night’s combat. But there was nothing; or rather, if there was some indication of the determined bug’s activities it had been destroyed by his own marks, the deep prints of his sandals, the crushed stems of desiccated wildflowers, the short trails leading out into the sage, with faint
moist discolorations at their termini. The bug had not died, apparently, but had finished its work and gone on its way into the desert, where tonight at least it would be able to labor undisturbed, unless by the avid night predators. He spent a few moments trying to brush out the signs of his own occupancy in the sand, but it was futile. The afternoon winds would take care of it in a day or two, and if not, the first winter rain or snow.
With the car packed, he took one last look around. Over the shoulder of the volcano to the west he could see small puffs of smoke where the road builders were already at work, but their feeble noises were deflected by the hills, trapped and swallowed. Here there were only the faint calls of a flock of pinyon jays, tumbling like black confetti over the distant pines.