Amy Wilentz - I Feel Earthquakes More Often than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger

I WAS DRIVING TO THE END of the world, I was sure of it. Instead of flowing straight and flat, like a normal roadbed, this freeway was all up and down. The hills I was passing through bumped their way to the horizon, where there was nothing. The sun scorched the road. Id left at nine in the morning, and it was past noon now. Id made hardly any headway. It took longer than it should have to climb those heights, one after another, and then descend, steeply, on the other side. Already my car thermometer said 107. Far behind me were the comfortable fields and developments of Bakersfield and human camaraderie; now I was working my way east toward the Mojave Desert and Death Valley.

Desert was the right word for where I was. In these blank, dusty hills you could come upon a camel, no problem. Youd say howdy.

I was thirsty, and thinking about history: history always has something worse to offer than the situation you happen to be in. The gold prospectors of 1849, for example. I focused my mind on them, seeking their fortune in California. Poor things. They suffered terrible thirst and desperate hunger as they made their way (and didnt make their way) with their skinny oxen through hills very much like the ones I was passing through, very near the ones I was passing through.

Death Valley was only a jump of the imagination away from here, a few more miles on the odometer. The forty-niners had left home for thisthis, and the gold beyond.

I was on my way to California City. I needed to see a city with a name like that in a place like this. I thought it would explain California to me; clearly California Citys founders imagined that somehow their creation expressed the essence of the stateand maybe it would. You dont give a place a name like that for no good reason. And on the map, California City looked fantastical, a huge grid, dwarfing almost every city near or far. It was laid out in a broad, rational oval of ring roads around what seemed to be a town square. I conjured up a sort of Emerald City rising from the desert. I knew such a city could be built, if you had the right engineers and the right portion of pure ambition and ruthless dedication to profit. Look at Los Angeles.

Also I wanted to get to a place where I could feel safe (not that I wanted to plant myself for good out in the Mojave; probably a couple of hours would do). I just wanted to know that such a place existed. Id been in New York on September 11, and I was still looking for a spot to live in that wasnt a reflexive, knee-jerk, obvious target. L.A. had not exactly served the purpose; it turned out that it wasnt removed enough from the national scene to qualify. But surely California City, so deep in the desert, so far from the 5 and the 99, those busy, flowing arteries, would be an enclave of peace, calm, and forgetfulness, a sort of modern-day, urban Xanadu, the kind of place so many people had been seeking for so long in California.

All along the 58, a lesser road, the desert rolled out around me like a faded rug, shaken for cleaning, twisted and contorted, its design, if it had one, indistinguishable. It was another planet out here: thats how it feels when the land takes over, when rock, mineral, and sheer topography are cold comrades and the world is bereft of the human touch, the human scale. You begin to go blank in these conditions, counting miles, zoning out, hoping the big rigs dont run out of control on the downhills and ram you off the road. I always watch for runaway truck lanes; thats what the sign says: Runaway Truck Lane, 1 mile. Then I wait to see the dead-end lane off the highway, a sandy embankment. Its a comfort to meknowing that somewhere, someone has planned to avert disaster, no matter how infrequent.

Theres someone out there.

Thirst and sun turn my mind to water, too: Is there any? Why did I forget to bring any? Can I get any?

As I pass a double rig, I suddenly remember a piece of ox liver. Kind, desperate, starving forty-niners on a Death Valley expedition gave this precious piece of liver to a Mrs. Brier, wife of the Reverend J. W. Brier, and to her three babies. That liver has been vivid in my mind since the day I read about its fate.

Mrs. Brier was busy doing something else at the moment the liver was presented to herchanging a diaper, kissing a bruised kneeand she put that liver on an upended bucket and she turned her back on that liver for one second. She was always ministering to someone in the caravan, not just her own. Meanwhile, some haggard fortune seeker, half-crazed with starvation, crept up to the overturned bucket in the evenings half-light and made off with Mrs. Briers liver. Mrs. Brier and her babiesafter several days without foodhad to make do that night with bits of oxen offal, horrid things fit only for coyotes.

I didnt want to be in such a place, where the lucky people ended up eating oxen offal. Refugees, pilgrims, and pioneersId always trusted that my era in history was going to spare me their fate, but like any reasonable former resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a neighborhood filled with immigrant and refugee offspring, I worried. In the past Id thought of people like Mrs. Brier as quaint artifacts of Americana, a breed almost unknown to me, and of which I certainly was no member. But September 11 made me realize that anyone at any time can join Mrs. Briers ranks, and now out here on the 58, passing Caliente with not a soul in sight, I could imagine it all.

The splashes of black, watery mirage along the road as it bucks and plunges are dazzling and seductive. Can that be a lake, I ask myself, looking into the near distance where the hills meet a flat, blue-looking area. The forty-niners, ablaze with thirst, saw these phantasms too, huge lakes shining up at them as they gazed down from some peak dreadful to ascend, dreadful to descend. On closer inspection, they would find an arid lake bed, its surface dry for so long that it had hardened like rock and now reflected the sun like dark glass, or the surface of still water. When I drive off the highway to my lake, it turns out that its nothing but smog or some other distortion of light, and so I head back to the freeway. I keep going.