“Not at sea.”
Biking through the Irvine Hills, past the university and inland. Sun hot on his back, a breath of the Santa Ana wind again. Tom listed the reasons he couldn’t leave, Nadezhda rebutted them. Kevin could tend the bees. The fight for Rattlesnake Hill was a screen fight for him, it could be done from the ship. The feeling he should stay was a kind of fear. They pedaled into a traffic circle and Tom said “Be careful, these circles are dangerous, a guy was killed in this one last month.”
Nadezhda ignored him. “I want to have you along with me on this voyage.”
“Well, I’d love to have you stay here, too.”
She grimaced, and he laughed at her.
At the inland edge of Irvine he stopped, leaned the bike against the curb. “One time my wife and I flew in to visit my parents, and the freeways were jammed, so my dad drove us home by back roads, which at that time meant right through this area. I think he meant it to be a scenic drive, or else he wanted to tell me something. Because it just so happened that at that time this area was the interface between city and country. It had been orange groves and strawberry fields, broken up by eucalyptus windbreaks—now all that was being torn out and replaced by the worst kind of cheap-shot crackerjack condominiums. Everywhere we looked there were giant projects being thrown up, bulldozers in the streets, earth-movers, cranes, fields of raw dirt. Whole streets were closed down, we kept having to make detours. I remember feeling sick. I knew for certain that Orange County was doomed.”
He laughed.
She said, “I guess we never know anything for certain.”
“No.”
They biked on, between industrial parks filled with long buildings covered in glass tinted blue, copper, bronze, gold, green, crystal. Topiary figures stood clustered on the grass around them.
“It looks like Disneyland,” Nadezhda said.
He led her through residential neighborhoods where neat houses were painted in pastels and earth tones. “Irvine’s neighborhood associations make the rules for how the individual homes look. To make it pretty. Like a museum exhibit or an architect’s model, or like Disneyland, yes.”
“You don’t like it.”
“No. It’s nostalgia, denial, pretentiousness, I’m not sure which. Live in a bubble and pretend it’s 1960!”
“I think you’d better board the Ganesh and get away from these irritating things.”
He growled.
Further north the sky was filled with kites and tethered hot air balloons, straining seaward in the freshening Santa Ana wind. “Here’s the antidote,” Tom said, cheering up. “El Toro is a village of tree lovers. When the Santa Ana blows their kites fly right over Irvine.”
They pedaled into a grove of immense genetically engineered sycamores. Tom stopped under one of these overarching trees and stared up through branches at the catwalks and small wooden rooms perched among them. “Hey, Hyung! Are you home?”
For answer a basket elevator controlled by big black iron counterweights descended. They climbed in and were lifted sixty feet into the air, to a landing where Hyung Nguyen greeted them. Hyung was around Nadezhda’s age, and it turned out that they had once met at a conference in Ho Chi Minh City, some thirty-five years before. “Small world,” Tom said happily. “I swear it’s getting so everyone’s met everyone.”
Hyung nodded. “They say you know everyone alive through a linkage of five people or less.”
They sat in the open air on Hyung’s terrace, swaying ever so slightly with the massive branch supporting them, drinking green tea and talking. Hyung was El Toro’s mayor, and had been instrumental in its city planning, and he loved to describe it: several thousand people, living in sycamores like squirrels and running a thriving gene tech complex. Nadezhda laughed to see it. “But it’s Disneyland again, yes? The Swiss Family treehouse.”
“Sure,” Hyung said easily. “I grew up in Little Saigon, over in Garden Grove, and when we went to Disneyland it was the best day of the year for me. It really was the magic kingdom when I was a child. And the treehouse was always my favorite.” He sang the simple accordion ditty that had been played over and over again in the park’s concrete and plastic banyan tree, and Tom joined in. “I always wanted to hide one night when they closed the park, and spend the night in the treehouse.”
“Me too!” Tom cried.
“And now I sleep in it every night. And all my neighbors too.” Hyung grinned.
Nadezhda asked how it had come about, and Hyung explained the evolution: orange groves, Marine air base, government botanical research site, genetic engineering station—finally deeded over to El Toro, with part of the grove already in place. A group of people led by Hyung convinced the town to let them build in the trees, and this quickly became the town’s mark. “The trees are our philosophy, our mode of being.” Now there were imitations all over the country, even a worldwide association of tree towns.
“If you can do that here,” Nadezhda said, “surely you can save one small hill in El Modena.”
They explained the situation to Hyung, and he agreed: “Oh, hell yes, hell yes. It’s not a matter of legal battles, it’s simply a matter of winning the opinion of the town.”
“I know,” Tom said, “but there’s the rub. Our mayor is proposing this thing, and he’s popular. It might be he can get the majority in favor of it.”
Hyung shrugged. “Then you’re out of luck. But that’s where the crux will lie. Not in the council or in the courts, but in the homes.” He grinned. “Democracy is great when you’re in the majority, eh?”
“But there are laws protecting the rights of the minority, there have to be. The minority, the land, animals—”
“Sure. But will they apply to an issue like this?”
Tom sucked air through his teeth, uncertain.
“You ought to start a big publicity campaign. Make the debate as public as possible, I think that always works best.”
“Hmm.”
Another grin. “Unless it backfires on you.”
A phone rang and Hyung stepped down free-standing stairs to the window-filled room straddling the big branch below. Tom and Nadezhda looked around, feeling the breeze rock them. High above the ground, light scattering through green leaves, big trees filling the view in every direction, some in groves, others freestanding—wide open spaces for gardens and paths: a sensory delight. A childlike appeal, Nadezhda said. Surface ingenuity, structural clarity, intricate beauty.
“It’s our genes,” Tom replied. “For millions of years trees were our home, our refuge on savannahs filled with danger. So this love has been hardwired into our thinking by the growth of our brains themselves, it’s in our deep structure and we can never lose it, never forget, no matter these eyeblinks in the city’s grimy boxes. Maybe it’s here we should move.”
“Maybe.”
Hyung hurried upstairs, looking worried. “Fire in the hills, Tom—east of here, moving fast. From the description it sounded near your place.”
And in fact they could see white smoke, off over the hills, blown toward them in the Santa Ana wind.
Tom leaped to his feet. “We’d better go.”
“I know. Here, take a car and come back for your bikes later. I called and they’ll have one for you at the station.” He punched a button on the elevator control panel, and great black weights swung into the sky.
A summer brushfire in the California foothills is a frightening sight. It is not just that all the hillside vegetation is tinder dry, but that so much of it is even more actively flammable than that, as the plants are filled with oils and resins to help enable them to survive the long dry seasons. When fire strikes, mesquite, manzanita, scrub oak, sage, and many other plants do not so much catch fire as explode. This is especially true when the wind is blowing; wind fans the flames with a rich dose of oxygen, and then throws the fire into new brush, which is often heated nearly to the point of combustion, and needs only a spark to burst violently into flame. In a strong wind it looks as if the hillsides have been drenched with gasoline.