While California Burns
(A List of Things)
(Fiction)
● A Ford F150 truck, stuck, gripping a mountainside in the Nevada desert, barely holding onto barren shale. It is stubbornly stuck in park: gears held tight by gravity and heat. It is also nervous and irritable, occasionaly slipping down the steepness and further off the road, in small jerky hops, skittish like a squirrel. It now squats at an angle so extreme that every effort to coax it into movement, push or pull, results in these skidding slippings. And with every slip, the slant increases, encouraging more sliding. At what point will the truck not stop sliding?
● An iPhone, failing to find a network, searching with overheating intensity. It’s signal fails, despite the lonely cell tower five hundred meters up the mountain, the phone’s intended destination. There is no other tower for thirty miles. No signal in this desert.
● A car jack, reclining, now, underneath the truck, unextended. It tries to cool in the only available shade, but its surface is still scalding.
● Nineteen feet of slightly rusted chain, looped around the front bumper. The chain pulled a slow trail in the dust, dragging a track like a sidewinder rattlesnake. This slithering line lengthens with every attempt to winch the truck uphill. It should strain, along with the jack-turned-winch, to pull enough pressure off of the gear to get the truck into drive. But it just pops out even the largest rocks and, along with the truck, slithers down the steepening hill.
● A respirator. Across the mountains, California is on fire. A column of smoke, miles wide and orange-white-blue in the sun, begins its descent in a slow tidal wave of apocalyptic energy: unseen trees and people, vaporized and descending in multicolored carcinogenic silence.
● Five cans of vegetarian chili, one empty.
● Only one and an eighth gallons of safe water, sitting, hot, in disposable plastic jugs in the cab.
● Thirty-eight gallons of water that might be poisoned, enclosed in a tank in the bed of the truck. This water weighs down on the trapped gear. It’s a temptation to drink it if the safe jugs get empty. It crouches sideways in a feeder tank, a reservoir of theoretically pure water, to be pumped into a smaller tank and mixed with Roundup and other herbicides. A bit of backwash, a little spit-up in the mother's mouth, this is possible.
● Half a tank of gas. Eleven miles to the gallon. Hopefully enough. For a bit longer, it feeds the engine, running the struggling air conditioner. Sweat evaporates, and, too quickly, there is only one gallon of pure water left. The gas, transformed, spews from the tailpipe: carbon-monoxides/dioxides, coughs out an invisible stream of used-up molecules to join the glowing sky.
● Fifteen gallons of Roundup, intended for application at the ineffectual tower on weeds that don't exist. Far from the tower, three hundred feet apart, tufts of sagebrush struggle among the thin sharp shale. The poison is to kill the weeds that might spark fires, preventing the cell companies from getting sued when California burns.
● A plastic Tupperware container filled with mummified crow and eagle talons, collected off dry corpses under other towers. Undoubtedly illegal to collect, this bouquet of claws sits on the dashboard, the oven-heat killing mites or maggots. Cell phone towers should not kill birds, don't kill birds. Yet underneath many like rotting fruit, raptors are splayed out grotesquely dead. Do they land on the searing steel, looking for a place to die in safety? Possibly. The only real trees were on the other side of the mountains. They, these trees, now begin to rain down in tiny white flecks, a wave beginning to crash, leaving a sun-scorched frost. If the truck rolls, the talons must be retrieved and buried before help arrives. If help arrived. Why would it? Bird hands are not the only hands that mummify in the heat.
● A sleeping bag, needed in remote Nevada, military-grade. Despite how hot the days are, a plume of freezing breath will emanate at night from within it, particularly if the truck is parked up at the top of a mountain in the howling wind. The sleeping bag is vital, allowing the truck to make progress through these isolated passes, preventing the huge loops that would be necessary if it were to find a seedy motel every night. Now the bag sits in the back seat with the other gear, baking in the sun.
● A portable shower, really just a pump stuck into the mouth of the disposable drinking jugs. It is to wash the flecks of poisoned water that aerosolize in the heat and drift in a shifting mist over skin, hair, and clothes. It is not enough. If water levels are low, like they are now, some sun-warmed water is trickled onto baby wipes, enough at least for a little rinse. Is this a trade being made? Will insufficiently cleaned skin unlock a death through time? “I'll pay you today for the tumors sprouting along your spine tomorrow?”
● A flat-nosed shovel, new, but already slightly rusted. Both tanks should be sealed, but when the truck jostles its way up obscure dirt roads, paths really, the liquid sloshes hard and blasts its way around the rubber gaskets. This liquid covers everything in the back of the dusty truck, evaporating quickly but leaving spots of rust and intimidating white powder. It, this shovel, is very difficult to use here: the sheets of shale and dust are loose enough to coax tires into slipping, but stay caught together like lizard's scales against a shovel. When again the truck slips down the hill, tall piles get pushed aside, many shovelfuls of finely powdered dust, undersized levys against a descending sea of rubber and steel. Everything had started with a slight miscalculation to avoid a boulder protruding in the road. Then, somehow, the back two tires, smelling burnt, were off the edge. Here the truck was placed in park, the gears sealed together at a steep angle. It took some time for the shovel to emerge, the precariousness of the position not initially clear. At first, it looked like the jack, wedged behind the back bumper, would be enough, and would pull the pressure off. The jack pressed the truck forward several inches, straining at the weight. Suddenly, the jack slipped on the loose rocks and the truck rocked back and down, pulling itself further off the road, leaving the first of those desperate slithering skidmarks. This was when the shovel first emerged in a vain attempt to stop further slipping.
● An oil dappled copy of Weeds of the West, memorized two years ago.
● Burger King packaging, balled up and sitting on the passenger side floor, purchased days before. A splotch of mayonnaise left on the wrapper, wafts a rank perfume into the cab. When bought in a tiny town, the attendant had to ask: "You know that is a fake meat burger, ya? I mean. I hear it is actually good though." Trash like this wrapper gets tossed aside, onto the side seat or down at foot level, a sedimentary chronicle of gas station donut wrapping, styrofoam coffee cups, snus tins, kettle-cooked chip bags, and dried orange peel. Sometimes this mess is stuffed into a plastic bag, but not today. Today this trash is spread out, pushed into nooks and crannies, feeling its way throughout the cab, eating space with tentative tuckings, wherever it can extrude itself.
● Three strange cactus plants, dying, sit inside a plastic tote on the back seat. These three are rescues, saved from scything sprays of round-up. They are starting to rot. They are beautiful, spines spiraling out from their centers, whirling out cosmically, a Fibonacci-psychedelic proliferation of points. They are born to bear extreme heat; yet now brown splotches are spreading from each base, a gangrenous growth, wilting these galaxies of spines from within. Cooked traveling companions.
● A bar of liquid Ghanan chocolate, cradled in the passenger seat, on day three of a cycle of melting and recombination, forgotten daily until it is too late in the warm morning to be consumed. There is this chocolate, the chili, and three-quarters of a bottle of Japanese Whiskey, somewhere under the laundry bin. Not enough to deal with an extended stranding. Yet it takes weeks or months to starve, less than a day to die of thirst out here when the jugs empty.
● A bottle of SPF 70 Sunscreen, broth-thin with heat. The bottle gains employment three times in thirty minutes. The sun is extreme, but three dribbling hits off the bottle is excessive. But what else can be done? It does not make the situation worse, and that is sometimes enough.
● A dropper of CBD, used daily on a swollen knee. It is unclear how much it helps. The knee aches throughout the night, the cold, cramped, cab a cruel place to relax it. How many miles could a person walk even with two good knees and plenty of water?
Enough to get to a real road? No.
● A shifter knob, immune to threats, pleading, screaming, scheming, thumping, gripping, grasping, twerking, twisting, tempting, tickling, cruel looks, violent thoughts, evil intentions, dissections, molestations and haranguing.
● A rust-colored fossil, a tall cnidarian of some sort, an extinct coral or gorgonian, found weeks ago, sitting in the center of another dirt road. It stood out, visible even from the cab, an ancient messenger through time. It’s illegal to take interesting rocks from public land, but not illegal to pulverize them into dust beneath kevlar-reinforced tires. This, too, would have to be hidden if help arrived. This F150 is no Beagle, no rusting ship conveying a shabby-curious Darwin. It would be hard to explain, this collecting, this need to rescue a bit among discruction. And now the rock sits among the layers of plastic trash, on the passenger seat floor, adding a couple of pounds on the trapped gear.
● A toolbox, a chainsaw, followed by the three cacti, a mess kit, and the plastic jug of water, all the contents of the cab, march single file up the hillside and plant themselves in rows on the road. The smoke thickens itself into a yellow-grey toxic cool-whip consistency, crowding out the aggressive sun in writhing and unfolding patches. The respirator, now unemployed, joins the mustering items, a hot and obnoxious protection from the viscus smoke. What about the tank of poison, far too heavy to lug up the steep hill?
● A twist valve, coughing up a sputtering stream of white and yellow onto the shale in a lengthening line. The rocks smell like fresh rain despite the choking smoke. It’s not rain. This spume flows around the rocks and disappears into the earth so quickly it might never have existed.
● A four-way tire iron, a stainless steel X, is planted deep into the road, under a massive cairn, a stack of back-breakingly heavy stones. A skein of the chain is wound around it, deep under the rocks, this X a head buried in the earth. The tail is wrapped, again, around the truck's bumper. It is pulled tight and looped back on itself, connected into a circle. The fully extended jack forms the last link, connecting it to itself. When compressed, the collapsing jack should pull the chain close together, getting the pressure off the gear. This will happen only if the cairn does not shift, if the chain does not pull the tire iron out from where it was sown.
● A slightly bent bumper, wedged against the tall cairn. This is fine. Better than fine, the four-wheel drive having been sufficient to blast the truck up off the slipping hillside and down onto the stack of stones. Uprooting the tower of rocks will be a relatively easy undermining operation. The gear is free, and the cab ready to be re-emboweled by the things spread across the road. Dregs of sloshing water in the feeder tank echo the arc of the truck's journey, back and forth, up then down, celebrating wonderful un-sipped-ness. The now-dry spot on the earth has disappeared, subsumed beneath its surface.
● An audiobook, murmuring, forgotten. A little whisper of recorded human chattering as a truck shakes and jostles its way down a mountain among floating sterile seeds of ash.