On most days the sun burns off the fog covering Land’s End by mid-morning. But on that day in 1961, it lingered and thinned, diffusing the sun’s light to a dazzling thick haze. Even the normally gloomy woods of brooding Monterey cypresses that cover the land on the Point were surprisingly bright. The light appeared to come from everywhere, making few shadows.
Earlier that day, I had made my way to the edge of the woods, where the land drops off and the rocks begin and where suddenly the roar of the surf fills the air, no longer muffled by the trees and the sandy ground. Along the way, I passed several spots where people had built fires during the night, where they had lounged, cushioned by soft pine needles, while listening to the wail of the foghorns, and where they had left behind their cans of beer, torn magazines and used condoms. Yet it is a beautiful, natural place; it was said that wolves lived here once.
San Francisco is one of the edges of the planet where the land falls into the sea, and the sea obligingly eats away at the land. For many, it is the end of the line, as far as one can go across the continent, in search of something, and still be called an American. And so it was for my father, who wanted so much to be one. He had come a long way from the second European war. He took his young family to Brazil, where he had a brother, a priest. He tried for ten years, never mastered the Portuguese, and gave up. Then, amazingly, he brought us to the United States, where he worked on the production line of a tractor manufacturer in Illinois. After a few months, he was laid off. So, in classic form, he packed his family into his 1959 Plymouth Savoy, and headed west, to Land’s End. He had gotten a job with a big engineering firm, having convinced his employer that he was an engineer. I have often tried to imagine the moment when his colleagues discovered he was not. But they kept him on anyway.
He rarely talked about his youth and early manhood. When he did, it was talk that soon filled with rancor, so he stopped and talked instead about the cars his family used to have, in its between-the-wars comfort: Mercedes, Jaguar, and even Chevrolet. I did not want to hear about their cars, as they were vehicles of sadness and regret. I preferred the rancor and the anger.
I looked out over the ocean and down at the rocks far below, feeling the enticement of the steep face of the cliff. It’s a long exhilarating plunge to the bottom. I lingered a little longer, staring at the gulls hovering in the air across the chasm in front of me. They stared back, holding themselves effortlessly aloft. Finally, I pulled myself away, and went back to our rented apartment along the jagged edge of the road that had fallen into the sea.
Just before the barriers that blocked the entrance to the road, I bent into an opening in the woods, and walked along the back fences of that last row of boxy houses. They were attached to one another, in a string going up the steep hill, like cubic beads in an ugly necklace, all identical, except for cosmetic differences on their street sides, stuccoed in the front and wood-planked in the back, in different pastel colors that dazzled in the bright depressive haze. Block after block of them, as far as one could see. I jumped the fence and crossed the yard where little grew in the sandy soil and entered the house through the ground floor bedroom window.
The room was bare save for the bed, which was nothing but a mattress on top of a collection of metal springs that had chewed its way into the drywall, along a line that revealed the hollowness behind it. Having been warned that termites were a big problem in that part of California, I imagined that they lived behind that bedroom wall. The room upstairs where my father slept also had a broken line in the wall from the sharp springs.
Muffled voices came from upstairs, jovial, laughing, backslapping voices. I stepped out into the garage to listen. They were men’s voices, louder now. I went up the basement stairs quietly and peered through the crack in the door at the top. There, standing, were two blocky looking men by the front door. Oddly, everything about them was blocky: their heads, shoulders, jaws, even their suits were blocky, and squared. My father stood off to the side in front of the brightly lit window. The men moved to the front door, opened it and left without saying anything more. My father turned and looked out the window. I pushed open the door to the small living room and leaned in for a better view. I heard one car start, then another that sounded like our car, our 1959 Plymouth Savoy, with the big fins and the push-button automatic transmission. I saw it moving slowly up the hill on the lower left corner of the window.
The air seemed to have gone out of him, and out of the room, leaving a vacuum that tugged at me, but I held fast to the door jamb, feeling sorrow for him…because he didn’t know. How did they know where he was? His new world was always throwing up unexpected surprises at him, and that transcontinental, transoceanic distance did not shield him from anything. He had lost too much. His image deflated, making him almost invisible, overwhelmed by the light. Outside, the foghorns howled still, as I retreated back to the basement, silently closing the door behind me.
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