PASSION PLAY EXTRACT

The Russian River

For a time Roger and I lived in a place in the hills behind Palo Alto. It was a cabin in the woods, only a few hundred yards from where the San Andreas Fault passed by.

We never thought much about the Fault, and in the time we were there, there was only one small tremor. I woke up one morning and there was a strange buzzing sound, like bees in the house. Then I realised it was the indoor antenna on our TV vibrating. Then I realised the whole house was shaking.

One Sunday we were supposed to go and visit some friends of ours who lived in Bolinas, that little fishing village north of San Francisco.

I don’t remember what we were fighting about, just the usual ongoing fight. I remember I threw a cup which exploded against the wall beside his startled face.

Despite this dispiriting beginning to the day, we set off for Bolinas.

Just past Menlo Park on El Camino Real, there were two hitchhikers, a boy and a girl. They had a small suitcase and a black mongrel dog. We almost didn’t pick them up because of the dog, but I was glad I did because they turned out to be nice kids and they told us they’d been waiting by the side of the road for a long time.

“How far are you going?” the boy asked me.

“To Bolinas. How far are you going?”

“To the Russian River.”

“Do you live there?”

“Yes.”

“It’s good fishing up there,” my husband said.

“Uh?huh, I have to get into that yet.”

They were very young, not more than seventeen or eighteen. The girl was pretty, but not striking. They seemed very happy about something.

“Where have you come from?” I asked.

“Just from Menlo Park.” Then he burst out, as if he could contain himself no longer: “We just got married yesterday. We came down here for the blood test. It’s free in Menlo Park. Now we’re going to our house on the Russian River.”

In America, at that time, if you wanted to get married you had to have a blood test to make sure you didn’t have syphilis. Funny to think back to that innocent time when syphilis was the worst thing you had to worry about.

In the rearview mirror, I saw they were looking at each other with expressions of pure joy.

It reminded me of a wedding we’d gone to in India. It had been a gross affair, snobbish and supercilious people, tables overladen with too much rich food, while beggars waited at the gates. The bridegroom was vain and arrogant, but the whole occasion had been redeemed by the love and trust on the bride’s face when she made her vows.

Something about the simplicity and innocence of these two dispelled the bad feelings between my husband and me. We looked at each other, smiled. The kids made us feel tender, parental.

So touching, off to the Russian River with their dog and their suitcase. I guess it reminded us of a time when our feelings were clean and uncomplicated, that time of hope in every relationship, before bitterness and resentment build up, before the original simplicity is covered over with an encrustation of ill feeling and bad habits. The innocence of these two enabled us to let go of our ill will, our sadness.

When we picked them up in Menlo Park, it was a bright sunny day, but as we drove towards San Francisco we could see the fog sitting on the hills and when we reached the city, it was shrouded in mist. As we went over Golden Gate Bridge, the fog was sweeping in from the ocean.

But as we drove round Mount Tamalpais, the fog lifted again and it was hot. By Green Gulch Ranch we passed some girls riding Appaloosa horses and there was the usual smell of wild sage from the brush on the mountainside.

Just before Stinson Beach, there was a stretch of mudflats where a few birds stalked and pecked. The boy said. “You see that there, that’s the San Andreas Fault. It comes right to the surface there.”

“Is that right?” I said. “I never knew that before.”

“Oh yes, I’ve seen it on a map. It runs up from Baja California and peels off into the ocean right there, right under those mudflats. It heads out into the Pacific towards Japan.”

I remembered seeing some aerial photographs, taken above the desert, where you could actually see the crack running along the surface of the earth, two walls of rock, one sliding south, one sliding north, held in place by friction. But the pressure builds up every year, until the inevitable moment when friction can no longer hold them and they split apart.

“They say the San Andreas Fault is going to split,” the boy said. “A lot of people are heading up into the mountains.”

I’d heard that, too. Some soothsayer had named the day when the fault was supposed to go and all of California west of the Sierras would drop into the sea, while on the other side of the world, Atlantis would rise streaming from the depths.

That hysteria about the Fault, was always blowing up. Soothsayers making predictions. Reports in the newspapers. Paranoia. The San Andreas Fault supplied a background anxiety for everyone living in California. It was a magnet for every personal and social split. The divisions between young and old, between black and white, the rifts in marriages, the splits in minds, all of this was sucked into the fault. You could imagine that when the Fault cracked it would be because the social and personal tension had reached breaking point.

Nevertheless, it was scientifically true that one day the Fault would go. Scientists said the time for a major earthquake was long overdue. It was crazy when you thought about it, everyone going calmly about their business, building a city again where it must one day be destroyed.

I remembered the tremor we had experienced. It was just a minor tremor, stopped after a few moments. Still, it’s always there, the possibility. It seemed to symbolise how precarious is everything we create: how easily torn apart all our constructions: how fragile all our hopes and dreams and aspirations: how vain all our endeavours.
My husband stopped the car at the turn?off towards Bolinas.

“Will you be all right here?” I asked.

“We’ll be all right. This is a good place.”

“Goodbye, then.”

“Goodbye, take care.”

We turned off to Bolinas and left them standing by the road with their dog and their suitcase, waiting for a lift to the Russian River.

© Harris Smart, 2003

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