In the Dust

In The Dust

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Those of us lucky enough to call ourselves Californians know that the best of California is not the beach. 

I do love the crash of the waves against the shore - a steady cymbal rhythm I can dance to. As a kid, I often frolicked with the rush and recede of white water as if it were my playmate. I taunted the waves, getting as close to their foamy edges as I could before sprinting away when they came crashing down. I loved the water, and I still do, even enough to know that the Pacific Ocean is not what makes California great. Perhaps I am biased because I grew up an hour from the beach, but when I think of why my heart yearns for California, I think of the dry desert of the Central Valley.

The days in the valley are an arduous fight against the beating sun. Icarus always loses. However, unlike Icarus, there is no water to drown in, so us desert dwellers don’t drown; we get up the next morning. 

The Central Valley is not beautiful like Santa Barbara, flashy like Hollywood, vibrant like the Santa Cruz Mountains, or soft like San Francisco. The Central Valley is the crunch of dry, dying grass under your careful footsteps. It’s keeping your ears alert for the soft tambourine of a rattlesnake’s warning call. 

It’s a first kiss on top of an abandoned shipping crate tattooed with graffiti. You played “The Last Days of May” in the car because you liked the guitar intro and he said, “Oh, Blue Oyster Cult. I think I know them”. He brought a blanket because it was one of the last days of May and the sun had set and he knew you’d shiver. He lit a cigarette as he tossed the blanket over your head, wrapping you in it and then his arms, and you made him put out the cigarette because you love the hills and shuddered at the thought of them up in flames. You told him you were moving to the East Coast, and he didn’t say anything, but the hiss of a rattlesnake began to form the “t” in “traitor.” You thought you could love him, but you’d rather he not see the rattlesnakes hidden in the brittle yellow grass of your mind. It was futile. He was a musician, and his ears were tuned to the frequency of tambourines, so you decided to never see him again - just hope that he writes a song about you to the tune of “Going to California.” 

Growing up, I hated California; my hometown, the sun, and the grape vines in our backyard that didn’t bloom for five years. I never understood why of all the places in this beautiful world to immigrate to, my father chose here, in the hot dust. 

He originally immigrated from Romania to the City of Angels. His arrival anecdote is rehearsed. 

“It was 120°F when I touched down at LAX.” 

I looked it up once: temperature on August 3, 1984 in Los Angeles, California. The internet says the high was something like 76°F, but I don’t tell him that. Maybe it was 120°F to him. Maybe the air around him was bright red and burning with opportunity, and the Olympic rings hung up in the airport to celebrate the third day of the Games were burned permanently into his retinas. Maybe the $100 he had to his name was burning a hole in his pocket, which is why he hopped in a taxi and said “take me to a record store” and bought “Dark Side of the Moon” on vinyl. 

He never talks about the wife or the Puerto Rican divorce papers (he’s never been to Puerto Rico) or the burning of the heart. He holds fire in his hands, and sometimes he uses it to assemble a record player and speaker system in my room, and sometimes he uses it to slam a door he has just walked through. Either way, he and I are California girls with the accent to prove it.

When I first moved to New York, my vocal fry and drawn out syllables gave my home state away immediately. Two years later, my valley girl accent has softened out with East Coast slang words and a New York sensibility. 

I know, in theory, that my father has an Eastern-European accent. If I listen closely I can just barely hear it: “Day [They] told me you have to steered [stir] it” - but my ear doesn’t pick it up. I had a friend once whose father was Australian, but she couldn’t hear his accent, asserting fervently that her father spoke just like her American mother. I thought she was joking, but now that I think about it, to my ear, my father speaks exactly like I do, with a flattened cadence and round vowels. 

“Tata,” I ask. “How did you learn English?”

“From rocky-rolly,” he responds with the nickname he gave our lord and savior Rock and Roll. “But they’re all British - The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles - so in the beginning, people always asked me if I was British.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said ‘No.’” The Eastern bluntness has never left him. 

“You know, it’s the weirdest thing because I can’t hear your accent at all. I can hear when your grammar is wrong, but the way you pronounce the syllables doesn’t sound off.”

“Well, I’ve been here over 30 years, so I hope I don’t have an accent.”

“No, you definitely have an accent. My friends hear it on the phone and when they come to visit. But I can’t hear it. You sound entirely Californian to me. I can hear when you make grammatical errors but - ”

“You mentioned that,” my father cuts me off. We descend into laughter - a sound separate from language.

My father’s Angeleno side comes out when he hollows out a bagel, never goes anywhere without a pair of sunglasses, when he yells “TMI” to mean “too much information,” or when he participates in overconsumption. It was a strange compulsion - to buy a store clean out of a product - that I never understood. 10 cases of beer. Five cans of garbanzo beans. 18 avocados. And the conversation in the car was always the same.

“Guess how many cases of beer they had?” he would tease.

“How many?” I always played the game with him.

“Eight. And guess how many I bought?”

“How many?”

“Eight.” He would laugh, to himself mostly.

“Why do you do that?” I asked once as I looked out the car window. I saw the palm trees that lined the highway, the ones I always thought must have been planted to sell the Californian Dream, and the yellow rolling hills stippled with trees: a work of art. 

“Do what?”

“Buy the store out of something.”

“It’s satisfying to me.” 

Undiagnosed OCD. I knew it. 

“I’m grateful to have the opportunity to do something like that,” he continued, and I realized it was something more. “To have the money to buy it all.”

Now, I accompany him to the store and help him carry it all to the car. 

My father began in LA and crawled his way north until he hit my neighborhood, the southernmost community of San Jose. My family often took trips back down to LA for reasons I was uninterested in. We always took the I-5 because it was quicker than the 101, even though the 101 turns into the 1 - the Pacific Coast Highway -  which kisses the ocean as if they’re married. To a five-year-old it was mostly the same, just another view to look up at from my Nintendo DS. 

When you drive past a field, the pattern the crops make out the car window sounds like a lottery wheel at the carnival, where the pointer peg slaps the pegs along the wheel in a staccato. Because the field is so vast, and the crops are planted so precisely, the gaps between the crop lines could be perspective lines on a white board in an elementary school art class. Only one looks exactly perpendicular to the car at any given moment. But, as the car speeds forward, your perspective changes so fast that the alignment is perfect only for a split second. But, in yet another split second, the alignment will be perfect again. It feels like it will go on this way forever. I hear the sounds of the field as we drive by: tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk. I hear the wind turbines in the distance too; the low vibrational hum that harmonizes with the drawn-out moos of the grazing cows. This landscape is my favorite song, and why I prefer to listen to the good stuff on vinyl. I want the earth to feel my music too.

I only loved California when I left. I don’t think that boy from the shipping crate ever wrote me a song, so I pretend “Going to California” is about me. I get on the plane with an aching in my heart until I find the girl I used to be, love in her eyes and flowers in her hair.

I see her now, at 16 years old, sitting on a broken plank of wood in the tall yellow grass on the hill across the street from our childhood home on Schoolhouse Road. That hill has seen her grow up. The hill saw her place bowls of water out for the deer because she was worried they wouldn’t have drinking water. The hill saw her make a cross out of two sticks when she buried her pet bird Sabrina at its base in the nook of a bush. The hill saw her cry over bad grades and boys and the heavy stuff.   

I remember being that girl. I remember being 16, leaving my phone at home and scaling the hill across the street from my house as I had done many times before. I remember zig-zagging through the path of flattened grass because that’s the route you have to take to get up and down something steep. I remember thinking that if I saw a mountain lion, I would do what my teachers taught me to in elementary school and make myself as big as possible with my hands spread up in the air. I remember being thankful rattlesnakes make noise before they attack because I could barely see through my tears. 

The ranchero guiding his white stallion startled me as I sat on my usual broken plank of wood. I had defied my parents in climbing the hill this late in the day, and until then hadn’t known the rancheros walk their horses at sunset. I squinted and held up my hand to get a better look. Thinking back now, I’ve almost convinced myself it was a dream: that beautiful horse with the braided tail, the tip of the ranchero’s hat, and the hot sun falling out of the sky, slipping right through my fingers. It was at that moment I realized why my father chose this place of all the places in the world.

Now, at 20 years old, people ask me, “Do you like New York? Do you think you’ll stay?”

“Maybe,” I say. “I’m not sure.”

But the truth is I do know. You are dust, and to dust you shall return.