Or, one song of Temecula I sang
It was already late enough and the road was full of fallen branches. Thrown into De Portola’s two lanes by the storm with the geometry and precision of Pollock, his bucket and his canvas on the floor. The clouds above left ajar for the moment, revealed the stars as flashlights searching for the moon. The two dim headlights of the inherited Ford Falcon persevered forward and illuminated each branch and stick that was a moment away from being trampled beneath the four old tires. The sound of each snap and break of damp, rotting wood joined together into its own soundtrack, at irregular intervals, cracking louder than the hissing tape deck.
With his hands gripping the worn steering wheel, Carson piloted the Falcon through the wild calm of the night. The fan of his mohawk, frozen with gel, pointed our direction forward, to outrun the rain that would return. The rain that knocked to the ground the branches gravity could not tug down on their own, washed into the middle of the road by the sudden tiny rivers, formed tiny lakes on the dirt shoulders of De Portola. Out the windows somewhere, far back from the mud gathering were houses and horses and orange trees, but we could not see them.
On the passenger side of the bench front seat, I sat with my black boots up on the red dashboard. With one hand I reached through my side window, just cracked open, to grab hold of the cold night. To try to take it apart and keep a piece of it with me always. In the backseat sat two more of our motley group, with their fists raised in elation, singing louder and louder at each defiant chorus coming from the speakers. Somewhere above the music emanating from the squealing, obsolete stereo, sat the resonance of the wind fighting to enter the Falcon, the popping of the branches left in the road, and the laughing, shouting spirit of teenage declarations of independence.
Carson could take us in the Falcon anywhere. All that mattered was that it went, leaving behind the driveways and manicured lawns of our parents’ homes. To speed past responsibilities and due dates and part-time burger shifts, that would, no doubt, always anticipate our return. Carson asked, Where are we going tonight? The answer came from the backseat, To the pier! The Falcon would then turn left, sending all in gravity’s sway to the passenger side, and avoid the few main roads of Temecula and its freeway onramps, to instead take Pala Road. The long way to Oceanside and its pier.
The clouds drifted in the opposite direction from our path, and the stars turned on, full power, to become a thousand tiny projectors setting the scene outside the Falcon’s windows. We watched the dance of the desert wind through the outstretched branches, extending and grabbing at the Falcon. We watched the yellow dashes in the road turn to elongated lines. We watched the residue of the rain play with the reflections of the streetlights above, melting red and green crayons on the wet road.
Once outside of Temecula, Carson sailed the Falcon through the bends and turns of the lightless Pala Road. Our little escape. With the radio on. Roadrunner, Roadrunner, from the backseat they sang. Going a thousand miles an hour. Roadrunner, Roadrunner, with the radio on. Carson never sang along. He just smiled with each sharp veer of the road and gripped the steering wheel tighter.
We entered the barren neighborhoods of the Indian reservations, and their ghosts, in those days before the casinos were built. Mobile homes, and crooked satellite dishes. A pay phone placed at a random empty intersection as if it were picked up once by a mighty wind and dropped down for no one to use. We swept through the farm town Bonsall, trying our best to awaken it. But it remained asleep, nestled beneath its blanket of citrus and darkness.
We stopped when we ran out of road. Oceanside and its pier. Carson parked the Falcon and we made our way onto the oversized plank that reached out into the never ending blackness of the ocean at night. Excited by the terrifying nothingness of infinity, we all leaned on the railing and either stared out or down. It did not really matter. No one could tell where ocean ended and sky began. Stray singular lights of ocean liners or oil tankers, inconsistent, dotted the horizon. We might have talked about girls, movies, or school, and laughed. We might not have talked at all. We might have stood in smoke and silence, louder than each wave that rolled onto sand, just like it did over and over again, before we were there and would over and over again after we were gone. When the rain returned it tickled the skin of the ocean and we piled into the Falcon. Two in the backseat. My boots back on the dashboard. Carson started the car, and we left.
