Stephanie Pushaw
Barrier Island
The first three months I lived in Galveston, Texas, I couldn’t leave the house in the daytime. From June to September the heat was thorough and relentless, thick and wet, laden with swamp and sweat, our air conditioning bill creeping up until it rivaled our rent. In no way was this damp inferno aberrant; this, I immediately learned, was just summer on the Gulf Coast, and hundreds of thousands of cheerful tourists, excluded from the prettier beach towns to the west by budget or limited vacation time, lay claim to the flat-packed whitish sand of the beaches, drank their way through coolers of light beer and thermos-chilled margaritas, biked up and down the miles of sidewalk elevated ten feet or so above the beach. When the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, to this day still the most devastating natural disaster in American history, hit the citizens of this skinny barrier island thirty miles south of Houston, it threatened to make an Atlantis of their Eden; a third of the island died, and the rest buried them where they lay in the shifting soils and then, over a decade, lifted the entire island with jacksaws, a feat which strikes me as fairly mythic but which to them was simply necessary. The island has above-ground cemeteries, marble mausoleums and rows of chalky, eroding stones, but for every stone engraved with dates of birth and death and little love notes, the stones on the long beaches, some gathered into purposeful jetties but most strewn across the margins of the sand like the remnants of a giant rockfall, mark the graves of others, surrendered to the sea.
For three years I’ve lived on this enormous graveyard, with the esoteric shrimp preparation preferences and burnt-in tan lines and circular ghost-scars of mosquito bites to prove it. The hurricanes have been, I’m bemused to report, predictable and mild. I’ll be leaving in five weeks. It will not be a lingering goodbye.
II. Seismograph
Growing up in California numbs you to the little earthquakes. They’re not natural disasters so much as natural reminders, little jabs in the base of the spine: the Earth saying hey, I’m still here, look what I can do! They keep us on our toes. Most of the time I sleep through them or think they’re something else: a truck thundering by on an overpass, an airplane landing at a regional airport. On social media people compare their experiences: sister’s ex-boyfriend complains he didn’t feel anything, third-grade teacher reports plates dancing to the ground in her Glendale condo. Some people just write “EARTHQUAKE!” We all feel it, even when we don’t feel it. Like when we feel people. I feel you, we say with emphasis to a friend, huddled against the world in the shared grace of a made-up italic phrase. And we mean: I empathize. I connect. I am not just a hollow voice trapped in a skull, looking at another.
I felt a small earthquake in the Coffee Bean on Larchmont once; the sneezeguard trembled in its shiny metal frame, the croissants remained intact. When it stopped I made eye contact with the barista. He made some joke. I laughed. Earthquakes, like block parties or eclipses or forced evacuations, bring us together.
Historically, the term “earthquake weather” has been applied to the hot, calm, sullen days, the days that stretch wavering like rubber bands over our foreheads and then snap. Hot days that make us tense, aroused, homicidal. Sweat stains and cold showers, lips red from being bitten, the desire to walk naked in search of a waterfall. Earthquake weather is purple clouds at dusk, hot with swelling, unreleased rain; it is the worst of the dog days, all bark and no bite. You want something to happen just so the warm, weird anticipation drops away. The last two weeks have been humming with heat, about to snap. I’ve walked through earthquake weather to buy booze and see movies, darkened under its brutal sunshine. Earthquake weather does not actually exist, having been denounced by both seismologists and meteorologists. Weather has no correlation to quantity or magnitude of earthquakes. Perhaps, it has been suggested, it is a psychological phenomenon. Earthquakes happen all the time, but we notice them more often when they occur in the hot, still days; we’re already turned on, tuned up, vibrating in our suntanned skin; waiting like sleepwalkers for the alarm.
After every little earthquake people talk about the Big One. The major seismological event that is always on the brink of coming, has been in the works for some time, could occur five minutes or five years or five decades from now. We have no measures of prediction for earthquakes; they’re the last great leveler. Even volcanoes we can predict, usually. The tension has been building for some time now. It seems we’re long overdue. If this were a screenplay, we’d be nearing the middle of act three: the climax. It’s a term that seems to fit in this situation especially well, with its connotations of bursting, of release.
We’re still waiting for the Big One.
III. On Feeling It
I never feel it. Eye contact is hard. People remark that I’m not very aware of how my body exists in space. I’ve been called “graceless.” I trip a lot. I zone out. But when I’m in the same vicinity as certain people, I know where they are at all times, even when I can’t find myself.
IV. Slab City
Home is California, doom is California. The name itself: long and lyrical and brimming over with gold flakes. The town I grew up in is 27 miles long and skinny as a whip, homes either huddled in the few feet between the mountains and the beach or dotting the wildfire-prone canyons. The PCH snakes up the coast, threading between the crumbling hills and the beach, which is often hidden by homes and hedges. There’s a lot of money. A lot of skipping class to surf, blaze, skate, paint. Real estate is perpetually astronomical. Astrology is perpetually real: personal psychics, crystal consultants. A popular beach is called Point Dume, and the first time I heard the name it hit my brain as a much more mortal homophone. There’s a lot of cashmere when the fog comes out and stays for the month of June, a lot of coverups, a lot of people who look young from behind. And always, humming beneath us like wires waiting to be tripped, the faults: places the Earth couldn’t get it together.
A few years or a lifetime ago, all summer, the radio kept playing a promotional commercial that finished with “endless summer ends July 27th.” We drove to the Salton Sea in the hottest part of the year to visit the beaches made of fine-crushed fish skeletons, their eyes sometimes intact. It’s a funny place, a mistake, an accidental ocean. In the midst of the desert, Salvation Mountain, a cupcake oasis made of plaster and paint and broken automobile parts and Bible verses. The huge red heart baking in the heat says Jesus, I’m a sinner. Please come upon my body and into my heart.
V. Disaster
Don DeLillo, White Noise: we deserve every disaster Earth can dream up for us. His characters watch catastrophes on TV. Far removed from the source, filmed and edited, beamed to individual television sets in individual houses, disaster becomes entertainment. “In our hearts,” says one of his pompous university professors, “we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom." I’m in a really good place right now. As long as I am on this sofa, in this hot living room in South Central, watching it on television, with a glass-bottle Coke from the Mexican bodega sweating in my hand, I am safe. Outside there are sometimes protests, sometimes nothing marching down the street but a plastic bag from the old grocery store they’re tearing down to put in a Trader Joe’s. The same sun looks down on all of it, has for years, for all I know. Inside is a slow ceiling fan, dirt in the corners, beer cans crushed haphazardly and stuffed under worn green leather sofas. There’s nothing above me that could fall in the event the Big One hits. Nothing but three stories of a big old house behind a rusting gate, with cracks in the ceiling where the light gets stuck, where the floors buckle slightly under a heavy footfall.
VI. Calls
Swerving through the canyon after midnight with a faulty steering column, the dreamy way my heart stops when I graze the edge. The thought of momentum, the car pulling itself down and down. The swamp-slow breaking of bones, the croon of crumpling metal. We have no word for this subconscious desire to fall over edges, to jump from heights. The French call it l'appel du vide: the call of the void. I have smaller calls to smaller voids.
VII. Location Cure
Since leaving Los Angeles for the first time shortly after college, I established a pattern of spending two years in each place, and spending most of those two years wondering what other places I am missing out on, which other landscapes hold secret destinies for the many, selfish, seeking mess of all the parallel universes I accept as an obvious truth. I live in the suburbs now. Placeless, home of placelessness, a word deceptively long and kind of beautiful, what with all its sibilance and internal rhyme, a word that somehow means less than the sum of its parts. The eternal, joyless homogeneity of the American landscape. Every community the same, the same repeating cycle of fast food joints and discount shoe stores, hardware chains offering the discerning DIY-er the opportunity to craft her two-story into something that reflects her unique personality, within a rational and displayed range of options. And there are so many options! There are tiles to ruminate over, peacock-flashy or demure; false cabinet doors to stand in front of and imagine what mysterious spices they might conceal, perhaps something spicy from Morocco or whatever makes chimichurri so green at the damn-good Mexican place in the strip mall. To be placeless is to live in a static, absolute nowhere; to put down a deposit on a beige condo with beige carpets and windows that may as well be suicide-proof. To go to the grocery store for groceries, the shoe store for shoes, the weed store for weed, and on every corner a ubiquitous convenience store, at which we buy whatever we need to survive another minute.
VIII. Happiness/Road Movie Montage
Chasing the sun up the best drive on the continent, the little strip of tarmac that climbs the spine of California, the PCH: tastes like sunscreen burning the back of your throat, like peeling off a sunburn in the shade of some biker shack with too-expensive craft beer evaporating on your tongue. A few years ago signs started appearing along the highway: Tsunami Escape Route. A stick person fleeing a massive wave like in that famous Japanese woodcut. We weren't sure if the signs were real or a clever performance art project: when I was growing up, that was the one thing we were sure of, that a tsunami would never happen here, because it had never happened here before. They're still here, every few miles, with feeble arrows pointing us up steep driveways, where, if not safe from the suddenly vertical ocean, we’d at least get a good angle on our impending extermination.
When it does happen, because Murphy said so and all Irish sayings are true, we’ll most likely be stuck in traffic. It’ll rumble through our tires, and at first will feel like the bass is getting to the good part, and then it won’t stop, and we’ll turn the radio down, look around for the truck, the low-flying helicopter. The radio will tell us to get out, head for higher ground. We’ll sit in our air-conditioned cars, purring quietly in rows, gleaming, with nowhere to go. On one side, an ocean rapidly becoming less pacific. On the other, a cliff bristling with white hotels, people leaning on the railings: Instagram-famous girl in a white bikini, holding a flute of champagne, which, moments before, she’d been angling to catch the glamour of a fading sun. Widower, wealthy, reading the magazine he found in the backseat pocket of his flight from JFK, since he forgot to bring anything else to read.
I got out of California to see what I could be on my own. On my own, when everything became steep as the hills, winding and dangerous as the PCH. I missed it sometimes, kept feeling for it in my brain the way your tongue feels lacerations in your mouth. I still miss it. The dizzy fronded trees, the fish tacos with mango salsa, the girls in neon swimsuits and platform boots, the sewage pipes leaking into the ocean. Even the beach traffic shuttering the veins of the roads from dawn til dusk for four solid months; even that, the way it made us at once livid and smug, the way we could, if we wanted to, stay hidden from it all, watching the lines of cars glitter in the angry sun from up high. The masses of kelp swirling in the gritty dark water around your legs, the dreams of tentacles in your sunburned sleep, dragging you beyond the reach of light or air. I missed the feeling of being on rooftops and seeing for miles. I missed the sprawl of it and the struggle to get from point A to point B. I missed getting high on insignificance, drinking from a warm water bottle in the desert.
I went to a bonfire ten years ago where I knew nobody and walked off by myself, stood in the dark water under a full moon waiting to feel whole. I sat on a rock with a man who has since joined the Coast Guard, who talked the whole time about tattoos and firearms, and neither of us wanted the other but that made it all so much better. We looked at the peninsula ablaze and the moon dripping into the water like a stock computer background. There was a dark shape halfway up the sand, a glossy baby seal, alone like a wet rock on the sand. I stopped walking ten feet from it and watched as it slid back into the dark breakers. When I wrote about this in a creative nonfiction workshop, a friend said it was cute but obviously made up, and suggested I try to tone it down a little bit.
I used to run on the beach in Malibu and watch tourists try to go swimming in the postcard Pacific, so enchantingly tropical with its swaying palm trees. They go in for a minute, come out cold, dripping, embarrassed, laughing. They get a sunburn. They get some ancho chile tacos. They take pictures of the smog-red sunset. Weeks later, when they get the pictures developed, the sunset looks flat, grainy, gray. They don't understand. They remember it being beautiful, like the last sunset on Earth. I remember it that way, for them, too.
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