Central Valley and the Coast:  A Guide

Station Hill.  A neighborhood built around a rural interurban station.  Greatly expanded after World War II by developers trading on the down payments of returning G.I.s.  Ranch styles, carports.  Small, carefully tended lawns.  Abbreviated split-rail fences.  Miniature wishing wells.

Laburnum.  Follow it to Maynard.  You see more passing cars, headed for Line Street and the freeway.  But at Laburnum and Maynard is a garden spot:  a large triangular yard with a modest water feature and dogwood tree.  Across the street a house that could be 16591's twin, with a smaller yard and a driveway instead of a carport.  Maynard is at the first light after you come down the hill from the freeway exit, so these houses seem to anchor that quiet backwater just south of all the noise.  Walk by 16591 slowly and study it.  The dormer is decorated modestly by vertical siding ending in a scallop pattern.  The dormer is a rich red-brown, the lap siding pure white.  Under the front windows is a parti-colored brick veneer.  A winding walk leads from the driveway/sidewalk corner to the front stoop.  The winters are wet and long here, so the entrance is sheltered under a deep eave.

 The dark corner is lit by a light fixture that seems to be a ship's light cut in half and mounted on the wall.  This, in fact, is precisely what it is.  The owner found the lamp in a stuffy shop on the coast and paid the price marked in grease pencil on a piece of masking tape.  He carefully peeled off the tape and cleaned off the gum with a solvent, then polished the brasswork and glass and took the lantern to a friend who was a glassworker.  He cut the brassworks in half and the glass while the owner bought a fixture that would fit under the glass and replaced the old jelly jar light with it.     Then he climbed in his butterscotch brown Brougham with the white vinyl top and drove to the glass shop.  His friend had carefully wrapped the half-lamp in paper and boxed it.  They talked for a while over some strong coffee, about the weather, the superbowl, the arrest of the glassblower's brother for a lid found under the seat of his squareback.

The glassblower, a sandy-haired, laid-back man named Stuart Smith, had considerately soldered some loops under the upper part of the brassworks, so the owner, whose name was Gil Binder, could mark their location on the wall above the fixture and drive some screws there.  He hung the lamp and was pleased with how straight and permanent it looked, as if it had always been there.  He was gratified completely when night fell and he saw the rich green glow it made by the front door.  Later he would sit on his couch in the front room, under a brass floor lamp, and read through a thousand-page typewritten report on ocean currents.  The couch was covered with a coarse-knit fabric decorated by exploded yellow and brown plaid squares.  The arms terminated in dark brown turned-wood posts that resembled the details on a heavy RCA console television that sat opposite.

Most nights, if you were walking down Laburnum, you could see him sitting there, either writing or reading.  He was a researcher and spent a great deal of time reading journals and reports and writing grants.  You would see his butterscotch Brougham first, parked in the carport.  The walls there were lined with well- concealed plywood cabinets that contained not a lot:  some diatomaceous earth, some ten-year-old potting soil, a bag of lime.  In another cabinet some well-worn hand tools and a small orange chainsaw.  If you knew him and knocked on the front door you may have heard Zoot Sims from behind the red and gold panes of glass set in the wall there.  And if you walked in and stood on the flagstone square on the other side you would have seen the TEAC reel-to-reel tape deck slowly turning in its place on the bookshelf by the television set.  Underneath was a turntable that played mostly instrumental jazz and what was once called, without irony or derision, "easy listening".  He was especially proud of his large collection of Jimmy Smith albums.  

That wall, that backed the television and stereo and separated the living room from the kitchen and back office, was covered with books and journals, mostly written on the subject of ocean currents, water composition and marine life.  Gil Binder was an oceanographer and taught at a community college about fifteen minutes away from his house.  The front regions, comprising the living room, its baked-orange enameled conical wood stove, nautical prints and blonde wood shelves, the partition, with its bullseye gold plastic panels looking on the kitchen and its orange countertops and dark wood cabinets, the vinyl-covered back entry that was usually crammed with outerwear and duffels, all of these were suffused with a faint smell of dust and burnt sugar.  For Gil Binder liked to make a sort of peanut brittle and keep it in a heavy jar on his coffee table.  Late at night, and sometimes into the morning, he would mark up reports and papers with a Flair felt tip and reach with his other hand for the heavy glass lid and jagged yellow-brown slabs inside.  His sister Susan would wonder, and comment to her friends, about his consistent lack of cavities, all the years he ate brittles and hard candies, from high school, through college, graduate school and his teaching career.  His shape, too, remained tall and thin, no matter how much of it he ate.  In fact he ate a great deal.  He was fond of spicy curries.  Susan used to say that he could have made a living as a competition eater.  Sometimes he would think about this when he watched a starfish envelop some soft-bodied animal over the course of a half hour.  

His sister was the only woman, besides his mother, who had died some time ago, who took any permanent interest in his personal habits.  He had dated in a small way in college, and even during his graduate work, but the relationships always ended amicably, if sadly, and he would catch himself settling into his brown and yellow couch with something like relief.  This lack of yearning on his part bothered him in some unguarded moments, but they were few and far between, and his work occupied his mind most of the time.

If you had walked down Laburnum one evening after an eternity of drives from the college in the Brougham, late-night papers graded, peanut brittle crunched, Flair felt-tips exhausted, you would find him, smaller, whiter, but still in his couch, a pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, a thousand-page report on one knee, the pages read curled under the spine in a wave of white.  Other than his appearance, nothing had changed.  The same Brougham sat in the same carport, the same bag of lime, now an antique, sat in the same plywood cabinet.

His career had changed a great deal.  An ambitious grant he had been developing for years finally had borne fruit, thanks to a friend who had been promoted to director of an important foundation.  His research had led him to the hamlet of Belmar, a coastal town almost dead but for a restaurant of some local note.  In fact, his research was connected to the restaurant:  their signature dish was a kind of rockfish that should have been plentiful up and down the coast but whose numbers had taken a nosedive except in the waters near the town.  He had gone just to meet the owner and tour the area, but now it was time to collect all the data he could find on the place and develop a hypothesis.

He remembered his conversation with Tom Madigan, one of the owners.  He seemed a valuable resource, a longtime resident who could give him the sort of first-hand data that you could only get in interviews.

He watched the light change.  The trees in the parkway had turned orange and gold and there was a hard grey-brown crust on the ground.  He passed the severe Lutheran church and waited for a woman to jog across the street.  She seemed barely aware of him.  What could she be thinking about?  Gil was always working on some problem or idea, turning it and seeing it from every possible angle.  But her expression was vacant.  Could you really have nothing in your head, a vacuum?  He was ashamed of the idea, because it was more than a little absurd, but he always thought that everything would simply shut down if you developed such a vacuum:  heart, spinal column, everything.  It seemed gruesome to him.

A yorkie terrier interrupted his train of thought by dashing in front of his car.  He saw its furry body and a leather lead trailing before he swerved and jerked forward.  At first he thought the transmission had failed and had torn itself out of the car.  Then he saw a geyser in front of the hood and realized he had struck the fire hydrant on the corner in front of his house.  His neighbor, Susan Hata, came running towards his car.  The dog was hers and she carried it like a bag of groceries.  It twisted in her arms, barking loudly.  She peered into the car and shouted at Gil, and at first he thought she was angry.  But she was shouting to be heard over the dog.  She wanted to know if he was ok.  He nodded, still confused.  He felt his neck and knees.  He felt a little tenderness on his knee but knew it was just a bruise.

Susan called the police and the city, then convinced Gil to come in her house and drink some tea.  She apologized over and over.  At one point Gil thought she might start crying.  He was mortified.  Gradually, though, the formality wore off.  She even waited with him while the city trucks and tow driver came.  After they had gone, he heard himself say "Sure" when she asked if he would like to come with her to walk the dog, whose name was "Princess".  He stood in her kitchen while she changed into a pair of heavy walking shoes.  This was what she was doing when Princess had run out.  He admired some prints hung in a vertical series by the window.  They looked like woodcuts, all of trees, all finely detailed and in different colors of ink.  She had made them; she used linoleum.  She taught printmaking at a local art school.  She used to camp quite a lot with her husband.  They liked to drive out to the mountains and scrublands around the town of Power and Light.  Gil had heard of it, usually as the definition of a place that was in the middle of nowhere.  But then he got sick, she said.  He passed away a couple years ago.   Stomach cancer.  Gil studied one of the prints, a coastal pine with its branches swept back.  "I'm sorry to hear that," he said.  She tied her shoe and rose to look out the window.  Outside was a small rock garden, landscaped with white quartz, some mossy stones and a pagoda lantern.  She rubbed her hands on her knees slowly, as if she were trying to scrub something off.  "I have my work now," she said.

That night, while he sat on his couch with his papers, he thought of her face staring out the window.  He pulled aside one slat of his blinds.  The beads that joined them made a dry, rattling sound against the glass.  He looked at her house, the empty yard, the darkened carport.  Next to the door was a litter of advertising supplements in tight white plastic bags.  He released the slat and it swung over the scene.  He got up and put on a Zoot Sims album, one with a sweet, complex version of the theme from "Rosemary's Baby".  He poured himself a glass of rye and lay on the couch and closed his eyes to listen to the music.

Later, the phone rang, but he was asleep.