And only two weeks before Liddy and I leave.
What a cheat utopias are, no wonder people hate them. Engineer some fresh start, an island, a new continent, dispossess them, give them a new planet sure! So they don’t have to deal with our history. Ever since More they’ve been doing it: rupture, clean cut, fresh start.
So the utopias in books are pocket utopias too. Ahistorical, static, why should we read them? They don’t speak to us trapped in this world as we are, we look at them in the same way we look at the pretty inside of a paperweight, snow drifting down, so what? It may be nice but we’re stuck here and no one’s going to give us a fresh start, we have to deal with history as it stands, no freer than a wedge in a crack.
Must redefine utopia. It isn’t the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.
Compare it to the present course of history. If you can.
One Saturday morning before dawn, Kevin, Doris, and Oscar biked down to the Newport Freeway, shivering in chill wet air. They checked out a car from a sleepy state worker and took off.
The freeway was dead at that hour, in all lanes. Quickly they hummed up to the car’s maximum speed, in this case about sixty miles an hour. “Another piece of shit,” Doris said. Kevin yawned; traveling in cars always made him sleepy. Doris complained about the smell, opening the windows and cursing the previous users.
“Spoken like a solid citizen,” Oscar said.
She gave him an ugly look and stared out the window.
Hum of the motor, whirr of the tires, whoosh of the cool air. Finally Doris rolled the windows up. Kevin fell asleep.
They took the Riverside Freeway up the Santa Ana Canyon, passing under huge live oak trees on the big canyon floor. In Riverside they switched to highway 395 and headed north, up California’s back side.
The sun rose as they traveled over the high desert north of Riverside. Long shadows striped the bare harsh land. Here and there in the distance they spotted knots of date palms and cottonwoods. These oases marked the sites of new villages, scattered in rings around the towns of Hisperia, Lancaster, Victorville. None of these villages were big, but taken together they accounted for a percentage of the diaspora out of the LA basin. You could say that “Greater Los Angeles” now extended out across the Mojave, making possible a much reduced density—even some open land—in the heart of the old monster itself.
Kevin woke up. “How do you know this Sally Tallhawk?” he asked Oscar.
“She was one of my teachers in law school.”
“So you haven’t seen her for a while?”
“Actually we get together pretty frequently. We have a good time.”
“Uh huh. And she’s on the state water board?”
“She was. She just left it. But she knows everyone on it, and she knows everything we might need to know about California water law. And it’s the state laws that determine what the towns can or cannot do, when it comes to water usage.”
“You aren’t kidding—I hear that all the time when I try to get building permits.”
“Well, you can see why it has to be that way—water is a regional concern. When towns had control over water there were some horrible local fights.”
“Still are, as far as I can tell.”
The country they were crossing got higher, wilder. To their left the Sierra Nevada’s eastern escarpment jumped ten thousand feet into the sky. To their right lower ranges, the Slate and the Panamint, and then the White Mountains, rose burnt and bare. They passed Owens Lake, a sky-colored expanse with a crusty white border, and were in Owens Valley.
High and narrow, tucked between two of the tallest ranges on the continent, Owens Valley was a riot of spring color. Orchards made a patchwork of the valley floor (apples, almonds, cherries, pears), and many of the trees were in bloom, each branch thick with blossoms, every tree a hallucinatory burst of white or pink. Behind them stood wild slopes of granite and evergreen.
They passed Lone Pine, the largest town in the valley at almost a hundred thousand people. Beyond Lone Pine they tracked through the strange tortured shapes of the Alabama Hills, some of the oldest rock in North America. After Independence, another big town, they came to Bishop, the cultural center of the valley.
The main street of Bishop, which was simply highway 395 itself, formed the town’s “historic district.” Kevin laughed to see it: an old Western drive-thru town, composed of motels, Greyhound bus stations, drive-in food stops, steak restaurants, auto parts shops, hardware stores, pharmacies, the rest of the usual selection. Bishop clearly treasured it.
Away from Main Street the town had been transformed: sixty thousand people lived in some of the most elegant examples of the new architecture Kevin had ever seen, as well as some of the most bizarre. In the northwest quarter of town sprawled the University of California campus. After they dropped off their car at the depot, the three travelers walked over to it.
The land at the university had been donated partly by the city of Los Angeles, partly by the Bishop reservation of the Paiute and Shoshone Indians. The buildings imitated the local landscape: two rows of tall concrete buildings stood like mountain ranges, over low wooden structures tucked among a great number of pines. They found a map of the campus along one walkway, located Kroeber College and walked to it, passing groups of students sitting on the grass, eating lunch.
Before some low wooden offices Oscar stopped them and pointed to a woman sitting in the sun, eyes closed. “That’s Sally Tallhawk.”
She was in fact tall, but not particularly hawkish—she had the broad face of the Paiutes, with thick black eyebrows. She wore a long-sleeved shirt (sleeves rolled up onto big biceps), jeans, and running shoes. A small pair of gold-rimmed bifocals made her seem quite professorial.
She heard their approach, rose to greet them. “Hey, Rhino,” she said to Oscar easily, and they shook hands left-handed. Oscar introduced Kevin and Doris, and she welcomed them to Bishop. Her voice was low and rapid. “Look here,” she said, “I’m off to the mountains, I was just about to leave.”
“But we came all this way to talk to you!” Oscar exclaimed. “And we have the festival games tomorrow night.”
“It’s just an overnighter I have in mind,” she said. “I want to check snow levels in Dusy Basin. I can get you folks all the equipment you need from the department, and you can come along.” Imperiously she quelled Oscar’s protest: “I’m going up into the mountains, I say! If you want to talk to me you’ll have to come along!”