Vehicle exhaust and industrial product fumes lay heavy in the lower sky. The other day, on the highway heading east through the sprawl, a magnificent brown tower of a cloud toppled across the horizon, pummeling the landscape and streaking gorgeously the sunlight of the early afternoon. In the cloud I saw a toxic forecast. Now I flee, and on the desert highway I spot brake lights and prepare to change lanes…
“Traffic & Weather Together”
Switch on the turn signal, hard plastic and a percussive click; checking first the rear mirror vehicles hovering back-right separated by about 30 ft., then the passenger’s mirror an opening maybe with a little slowing; glance over the shoulder for the blind-spot shift the wheel and—black sedan, a specter creeping up the right side; switch off the turn signal return to center, observe the changing situation sedan now approx. 10 ft. in front; checking again the passenger’s mirror finally an opening; the wheel turning clockwise some minuscule degree; drifting across the lane, navigating between widening and narrowing gaps checking and checking again the speed of the surrounding vehicles and barely calibrating to shift the trajectory… eventually coming to a settling division between the two parallel lines in the next space over.
Although settling is not the word. The other day at 40 mph, a car parked on the right side of my lane turned directly out in front of me and I resigned myself to the crash, awaiting it although I was spared, somehow miraculously, my instinctual reaction of pounding on the brakes and veering to the left averting my tires from a sidelong collision. I knew then my own death could rest upon the animal of my brain while reason prepared for impact. I knew then I was truly powerless, unable to stop driving and unable to even prevent the circumstances. Less than two hundred years ago the fever could bring a sudden end, but no one feared the crushing, and I fear it constantly, a mechanical failure of one of the machines: the vehicle, the freeway, the body; collapsing metal frame, crumbling overpass, plastic film no air can pass through. As effortless to collapse our lungs to sigh the emptiness from ourselves, as effortlessly that gentle and powerful creature of the darkness empties us again.
I could have killed that person, hitting the driver’s side of the car like that.
Not settled, not while piloting the vessel of my own potential demise, not when so much of what I do still deals in avoiding calamity. I’m still moving, rather quickly down this open highway, a lone rider in a post-apocalyptic scenario that includes functioning freeways and plenty of gasoline. I check the mirror and witness the sun eclipsing behind the traffic median. I check the mirror again because mirrors cannot be trusted; last night one showed my face back to me in the bathroom.
And last night black monoliths circled the lower atmosphere. Cumulonimbus. By drawing up warm air from the surface they fueled their towering rise. A cold wind moved into the valley to equalize the low pressure. A freeze warning was issued for the desert tonight.
***
When individual particles of water vapor reach a high enough concentration, or are cooled to reduce their kinetic vibrations, they cling together around solid particles—dust or pollen, mostly—to form water droplets, and once they become heavy enough, they fall.
They descend with these captured particles, not in the teardrop-shape associated with rain, but more like open parachutes, the Earth-side flattened by air resistance. They pound into the ground with a consistency of applied pressure powerful enough to wear down mineral layers over time. This process of drawing particulate matter from the air and sinking it to the surface has regularly cleansed the lower atmosphere of natural particles, and now it collects the carbon-based emissions of factories and combustion engines. The Earth filters the particles from the water, returning them to the composition of the soil, and in the valley sprawl the rain slicks the asphalt with chemicals, transferring the volatile fingerprint of machine exhaust from the air to the surface.
Boy Scout Handbook
This mechanism can be used to your advantage in a water shortage, with a simple trick to collect the condensation. All that’s required is a sheet of plastic, a bucket, and a few small rocks. First dig a hole in the ground (deeper and a little wider than the bucket), then place the bucket at the bottom. Lay the sheet over the opening of the hole, anchoring the corners with soil or a few rocks, and place a single rock (not too heavy) in the center of the plastic so the middle sinks a few inches into the hole—an inverse cone hanging directly over the bucket. Over the course of the day, the sun will heat the plastic and the trapped air, causing moisture from the soil to condense on the underside of the plastic, sweating down its length and dripping into the container. It’s cleaner than rain, and more replicable.
Pulling into the parking area not sure about a campsite; dark now but the glow from fires onto the rocks, these colossal rocks arching around me and the silhouette of someone crawling inching forward like a spider; the desert tonight seems crowded but here an empty parking space, there’s a name on the wooden post—if someone comes I’ll just have to leave, but maybe they won’t mind just another car, at most another tent I don’t need much room; stacked in the trunk my pulled bedding, camping equipment, a bag of groceries; in the bag a few bottles of water, a couple apples, trail mix with almonds cashews & cranberries; the inside quiet, sheltered from the outside the rustling of brush crunch of gravel; in the silent car, changes in light cause disturbance, distant headlights catch angles of rocks and foliage projecting their blown up distorted patterns onto ancient sediment deposits and as the night wears on drowsiness descends like a curtain—
—wake in the night, vulnerable to the freezing air nested in my bedsheets/sleeping bag, I pull my exposed hands & forehead under the covering; flickering of foreign light again but now terror frightened by the outside world, its ability to disturb my flimsy shelter, to make me get up and move somewhere else; spreading onto my back the sky above filled with stars and black—
—in the morning a birdcall like a human imitating a bird, I move slowly to wake to witness a few rabbits; out of my car into the biting air onto the rocks, coyote scat and I think about the animal out here, for them it’s life but for me it’s something else; eventually to an altar of sorts an open corridor in the rock with a few plants; sun coming in too harsh already and forced to move to get out of the center; a little scrambling and a nice spot to observe the morning and god, there are no clouds the sky empty no marking of the brown cleansed by atmospheric shifting; now my body flattened to the rock absorbing the warmth of the early sun & heat radiating from the material of my jeans, in this early dawn before the sun gets too high, in solitude the closed circuit of my mind grounded; a man with a plastic bin walks up the trail, I see him from quite a distance—he pauses, what is he doing? he begins to climb the rock then stops, another man coming up the trail, “don’t die” says the second man to the first; eventually a few boys gather apparently to climb: Boy Scouts; the first man’s plastic bin is full of climbing gear and the man I assume to be the troop leader gives a small speech about respecting the desert plants and animals and jokingly threatens the death penalty if the scouts do not obey & the first man jokes that California has voted down the death penalty, which is not true, so the scout leader corrects him; there appear to be about nine of them, they work in uniform like little colonizers/wilderness explorers and they practice pulling themselves up the sides of the rocks and when I hold myself close to the rock it releases me from my own death via car crash or suffocation and these scouts prepare so earnestly a division between natural and flimsy, the past before my eyes and when I look out at the desert landscape not the past but forward to rows upon rows of holes in the ground with plastic sheets and although we fuck up everything, despite everything this morning I watched from inside my car as two jack rabbits hopped past.
Small print: an earlier version of this essay appeared in the 2nd edition of the Mentone Special, and was awarded the 2013 Best Nonfiction Essay by the University of Redlands Creative Writing Department in a blind judging.
Joe Taylor 