Angela, always first in these things, pulls off her blouse and throws it on the floor of the balcony, in the middle of the marchers. Bra next. Can she get her jeans off while doing the can-can? In a manner of speaking. Howls scale the sky. Clothes begin to fly onto the pile, a flurry of shirts, pants, blouses, silk underwear, boxer shorts. Quickly they’re a ring of naked dancers, as in some pagan rite of spring, they can all feel it and for once it has that quality of primitive sensuousness, no all-American tits-n-ass consciousness in Abe tonight, it’s just the clean joy of having a body, of being able to dance, of Being and Becoming. The way the pink of skin jumps out of the night’s smeary darkness is just part of the joy of it. Freckled Sandy tosses all the couch cushions in the ap onto the big pile of clothing, and then he dives on, swims into the pile, ah-ha, a pile-on here. Naked Humphrey is dancing wallet in hand, can’t just throw that in a pile of other people’s clothes, right? Abe starts howling again, laughing and howling, he can’t get over how good everything feels, how happy every face looks to him, there’s Jim happy, Sandy happy, Angela happy, Tashi and Erica happy, Humphrey happy, all of them dancing in a circle and howling at the sky, Abe dives into the great mass of clothes and people and cushions, clean laundry smell, he’s buried, he’s coming up for air, coming up to be born, like the baby he helped bring into the world just hours before—born out of their clothes, naked, shocked at the pure glossy presence of things, their sensuous reality, their there-ness. For the second time that night Abe Bernard squeezes shut his eyes and wills the moment to stop, to stop while he and all his friends are happy, to stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
32
… In the 1790s the area still belonged mostly to the Indians, now called Gabrielinos. The Spanish rarely ventured away from San Juan Capistrano and the El Camino Real, and they avoided the swamps and marshes above Newport Bay, because these were difficult to traverse on foot or horseback.
But during those years the bay had some visitors. A party of French-American colonists, en route to Oregon by way of the long trip around Cape Horn, sailed into the bay and wintered there. The next year a small group returned from Oregon, and they lived on the mesa above Newport Bay for nearly twenty years. These were the first non-Indian residents of the area.
History doesn’t tell us much more about these French-Americans than that. But we can deduce a fair amount about the lives they must have led. They were from Quebec, they were used to the wilderness, and they knew the crafts necessary for survival in it. They must have been fishermen, and perhaps they did some farming as well. We don’t know if they were literate, but they easily could have been; they may have had some books along with them, a Bible perhaps.
They must have had contact with the Indians who lived on the bay; perhaps they learned where to dig for clams, where to set snares, from Indian friends. There was an Indian village on Newport Mesa, called Genga; they must have spent some time there, learned a bit of the Gabrielino language. The Spanish called the bay Bolsa de Gengara, after this village; what did these French call it? If we knew what the Indians called it, perhaps we could guess.
At that time, in the same years that the French Revolution and Napoleon were causing such upheavals in Europe, Newport Bay did not look like it does now. The Santa Ana River, which ran all year around, drained into the vast marshes at the upper end of the bay; these marshes extended all the way in to Santa Ana and Tustin. And the upper section of Newport Bay was open to the sea. Balboa Peninsula did not then exist; it was created by flooding of the Santa Ana River in 1861. The river itself did not swing into its new delta at 56th Street until the 1920s, in another great flood.
Ocean, estuary, marsh, grasslands, hillsides; it was a land of great variety, teeming with life. And this little group of French-Americans—how many were there?—lived in the midst of this wilderness, with their Indian neighbors, in peace, for over twenty years.
What must their lives have been like? They must have made their own clothes, shoes, boats, homes. Children must have been born to them, raised until they were perhaps twenty years old. Perhaps some of them died there. Their days must have been spent hunting, farming, fishing, exploring, making, talking—speaking French, and Gabrielino.
Why did they leave? Where did they go, when they left? Did they return to Oregon, to Quebec, to France? Were they in Paris when the Napoleonic wars ended, when the train tracks were laid? Did they ever think back to the twenty years they had spent on the California coast, isolated from all the world?
Perhaps they never left. Perhaps they stayed on the shores of the primeval bay, in a little bubble of history between the dream time of the Indians and the modern world, until they were exterminated with the rest of the Gabrielinos when the Europeans came up from Mexico—killed by people who couldn’t tell them from Indians anymore.
33
Next time Arthur comes by, Jim decides to take the direct approach.
“We have another strike planned,” says Arthur.
And Jim replies, “Listen, Arthur, I want to know more about who you are, who we are. Who exactly we’re working for and what the long-range goals are! I mean, the way it is now, I don’t really know.”
Arthur stares at him, and Jim swallows nervously, thinking that he may have gone too far somehow. But then Arthur laughs. “Does it really matter? I mean, do you want a name? An organization to pledge allegiance to?”
Jim shrugs, and Arthur laughs again. “Kind of old-fashioned, right? The truth is that it’s more complicated than you probably think, in that there is more than one so-called group doing all this. In fact, we’re stimulating a lot of the action indirectly. It’s getting so that half of the attacks you hear about are not actually our doing. And it seems to be snowballing.”
“But what about us, Arthur. You. Who supplies you, who are you working for?”
Arthur regards him seriously. “I don’t want to give you anybody’s name, Jim. If you can’t work with me on that basis, you can’t. I’m a socialist and a pacifist. Admittedly my pacificism has changed in nature since I’ve decided to join the resistance against the weapons industry. But like I told you, the methods I tried before—talking to people, writing, lobbying, joining protests and sit-ins—none of them had any tangible impact. So, while I was doing that I met all sorts of socialists. You wouldn’t think any existed anymore in America.”
“I would,” Jim says.
Arthur shrugs. “Maybe. It’s almost a lost concept, that individuals shouldn’t be able to profit from common property such as land or water. But some of us still believe in it and work for it. There could be a combination of the best of both systems—a democratic socialism, that gave individuals the necessary freedoms and only prohibited the grossest sorts of profiteering. Everyone has a right to adequate food, water, shelter and clothing!” Frustration twists Arthur’s face into the intense mask Jim remembers from their poster raid on SCP. “It’s not that radical a vision—it could be achieved by votes, by an evolutionary shift in the law of the land. It doesn’t have to be accomplished by violent revolution! But…”