The five hundred miles of irrigated fields and orchards that is the Central Valley comes to a stark finish at it's southern end, enclosed in brushy sunbaked mountains. The highway planks upwards: the bus groans in low gear. At the side of the road a man fans his hat at a steaming radiator while two women talk into their cell phones. The bus climbs and passengers sleep, worn by the long ride from San Francisco, the heat, memories of a fog-fringed coast. Evening light streams ruddy through the windows, casts deep shadows into the high, gouged ridges. Over Tejan Pass (4100'): the reservoir brim-full with snowmelt pumped across valley from the Sierra Nevada: a king's table set before starved mountains.
The bus
ride has made us family, our wandering lives braided together for
eight hours of travel. Sharing a mini-table, sitting hip to hip: an elderly black woman in knitted green headscarf talks on a cellphone
to her reflection in the window; an Asian woman in designer
sunglasses chats across isle to a young woman that could be her
daughter; a young white guy with purple hair and painted toe nails,
purple legwarmers cut away to allow his feet into flip-flops,
sketches in his oversized notebook, endearing himself to the other
women with his feminine, eccentric, yet good-boy ways. They want to
see what he's drawing. They adore his nails. He responds with a joke:
“Oh, I just love your nails,” an older woman says to a young
woman, “But I'm too old for that whore
look.”
The
women laugh. They share the gummy bears he's brought with him. He's
the white weird son they never had. Then, slowly, they go their
separate ways. He slouches into his drawing, the mother returns to
her daughter, the black woman closes her eyes and falls deeply
asleep, mouth agape, under waves of weak light.
Beside
me sits a young woman from Wisconsin who's returning from a weekend
in San Francisco to her masters in composition courses at UCLA.
“David Lang,” she offers when I ask her for a must-know
contemporary composer. “Post-minimalism; space, but musical.”
She's a touch awkward; hunched at the shoulders as though forever at
a piano, at study, at ease only in solitude. She accepts a piece of
chocolate only after I insist. I imagine the verdant fields and
gentle cows of her home state – not these barren ridges, a harsh
overture to the urban counterpart that awaits her. I imagine a
tenderness, a sensitivity which forces a degree of escapism of her, a
retreat into the formal abstractions of music, the constrained
geometries of the heart.
Two
toughs in punk-skate décor sit near the driver. Black trucker hats
bearing Thrasher in electric green thread. Black Levi jackets,
sleeves cut off at shoulders, studded with pins, stitched with
appliques, one of which directs the observer to Fuck Off. The
bigger tough pulls out his Gameboy. His olive skin glows in screen
light, his dark eyes go pliant, soft, human. The other tough yelps
into his cellphone: “We barbequed and shit. Man, I heard you
hurling in the bathroom.” Life in LA has roughened them. The city
wears you down, yet to matter at all you must declare yourself,
usually in the most conspicuous way of all: fashion and attitude. You
must show how much you don't care by how much you do.
And
eventually they too fall asleep, adrift in the dream wagon where we
are all brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, angry and shy,
disfigured and beautiful, suspended from our lives, entrusting our
homecoming to the orange-haired benevolent butch at the wheel. The
big woman reaches overhead, throws a switch, then barks into a
microphone. She wants to thank us for being such good riders. She
wants us to be safe. She wants us to know it's been a pleasure. And
by her frank voice, we know she means it.
