University:
Alcorn State University
Course:
EN 213 | Studies in Literature
Academic year:

2019
Views:

321

Pages:

10
Author:

5CelestialChronicle

Some Dreamers ofthe Golden Dream This is а story about Jove and death in the gold land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley Jies only an hour east of Los Angeles Ьу way of the San Bernardino Free'way but is in certain ways an alien р!а се: not the coastal the California of suЬtropical twilights and the soft wester!ies off the Pacific but а harsher California, haunted Ьу the Mohave just beyond the mountains, devastated Ьу the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the Eucalypts windbreaks and works оп the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills Ыаzе up spontaneously. There has been по rain since April. Every voice seems а scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind Ыows. The Mormons settled this ominous country, and then they abandoned it but Ьу the time they Jeft the first orange tree had been planted and for the next hundred years the San Bernardino Valley would draw а kind of реор!е who imagined they might live among the talismanic fruit and prosper in die dry air, people who brought with them Mid-western ways ofbuilding and cooking and praying and who tried to graft those ways upon the land. The graft took incurious ways. This is the California where it is possiЫe to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting а Catholic or а Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy а book. This is the country in which а belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptiЬly into а beliefin the literal interpretation ofDouЫe Indemnity, the country ofthe teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to а waltz-Jength white wedding dress and the Ьirth of а Кimberly or а Sherry or а DebЬi and а Тijuana divorce and return to hairdressers' school. "We were just crazy kids" they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because по one remembers the past. Here is where the hot wind Ыows and the old ways do not seem re\evant, where th!! divorce rate is douЫe the national average and where one person in every thirty-eight lives in а trailer. Here is the last stop for all those who соте from somewhere e!se, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Неге is wherethey are trying to find а new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers. The case of Lucille Marie Maxwell Miller is а taЫoid monument to that new life style. Imagine Banyan Street first, because Banyan is where it happened. The way to Banyan is to drive west from San Bernardino out Foothill Bou\evard, Route 66: past the Santa Fe switching yards, the FortyWinks Motel. Past the motel that is nineteen stucco tepees: "SLEEP IN А WIGWAM-GET MORE FOR YOUR WAMPUM." Past Fontana Drag City and the Fontana Church of the Nazarene and the Pit Stop А Go-Go; past Kaiser Steel, through Cucamonga, out to the Kapu Kai Restaurant-Bar and Coffee Shop, at the corner of Route 66 and Carnelian Avenue. Up Carnelian Avenue from the Kapu Kai, which means "Forbldden Seas," the subdivision flags whip in the harsh wind. "HALF-ACRE RANCHES! SNACK BARS! TRAVERTINE ENTRIES! $95 bOWN." It is the trail of an intention gone haywire, the flotsam of the New California. But after awhile the signs thin out оп Carnelian Avenue, and the houses are по longer the bright pastels of the Springtime Ноте owners but the faded bungalows of the people who grow а few grapes and keep а few chickens out here, and then the hill gets steeper and the road cliщbs and even the bungalows are few, and here deso\ate, rough\y surfaced, lined with eucalyptцs and lemon groves---is Banyan Street. Like so much ofthis country, Banyan suggests something curious and unnatural. The lemon groves are sunken, down а three- or four-foot retaining wall, so that one Jooks directly into their dense foliage, too lush, unsettlingly glossy, the greenery ofnightmare; the fallen eucalyptus bark is too dusty, а place for snakes to breed. The stones look not like natural stones but like the rubЫe of 1