Gas Station Sushi (fiction)

Recently, I saw a writing challenge for "The Last Gas Station", for which one was asked to write a piece about the concept, rather than the reality. The concept of the last gas station, apparently, was the last chance to do something, or avert something, before a bad thing happens. Possibly the challenger had gotten it mixed up with The Last Chance Saloon, a similar concept with which I'm more familiar. 

I remembered a gas station I had once visited. In the middle of nowhere, it had blossomed out of the heat haze of the desert like a combination mirage and oasis, a vast edifice of neon light, cool breeze, flowing liquids and ice cubes.  I wrote about it, thought about the challenge a bit more and realized I loved the gas station part more than the "last" part.  Here it is. 

Gas station sushi

Three hundred miles of sagebrush emptied the tank of the Chevy Impala. The roadside billboards advertising the Arizona Travel Center had been appearing more frequently and the tall sign indicating the building itself materialized just as the tank indicator began to flash its red “E”. 

“Travel Center? It’s a gas station,” I said as we pulled away from the pump replete with regular unleaded and parked in the shade of a pylon bearing gas prices, the temperature (104 degrees) and the promise of a Grab’n’Go Hot Dog Bar.

“Wait till you get inside,” he said.

The glass doors swished open like the Starship Enterprise revealing the front line of displays. Slim Jims, Matador Jerky, All-American Jack Link’s Beef & Cheese. After navigating past these, and the racks of Pringles, Poppycock, popcorn and chips, and the wasabi peas and gummi bears, nuts and trail mix, wrapped bread and gum (Extra Icebreakers, Juicy Drop), we approached the long wall of refrigerators. Six glass doors held back neon-colored soft drinks, two the Beer Cave, one the Dairy Chilled Foods, one the wine (Refridgeriffic) and one (The Cool Zone) containing sushi. Little California Rolls in plastic trays, with plastic rows of grass separating the ginger from the wasabi, the chopsticks from the sachet of soy sauce, and each of them from the sushi. Eleven bucks.

He laughed. “Gas station sushi. Where I come from, it’s a phrase meaning take a chance on something dangerous, I guess. Or just a word for a good-looking bad idea.”

On the other wall, mirroring the refrigerators, the Hot Snacks. Under heat lights hot dogs rolled. In warm cabinets pies and grilled subs estivated in factory-sealed plastic bags. Nachos waited in cardboard trays for a squirt of liquid cheese. Next to the hot dog roller was a bank of the freshest-looking food I’d seen in days, beef franks, sweet pepper provolone sausages, bratwurst, Fenway Franks and Vegetarian Dogs. I was hungry. I chose a regular frankfurter, and from the hot dog buns, brioche buns, Hawaiian buns and Salty Pretzel Buns I chose pretzel. Sixteen fixins for hot dogs dwelt in black plastic wells behind a protective sneeze guard.  They were chili, jalapeno, sauerkraut, tomato slices, lettuce, diced onion, sweet relish, cheese, pickle spears, onion sour cream, kimchi, gochujang, Habanero Nuclear Blast, Kentucky Slaw and other, more orange, cheese, and bacon bits. I put sweet relish and diced onion on mine. There were dispensers you pressed down on to create wavy lines of sauce on your dog, and they were ketchup, yellow mustard, brown sauce, horseradish, mayo, salsa, buffalo wing sauce and Sriracha. I mashed down on mustard and mayo.

He chose sushi, a bright, cool tray of avocado-topped California Roll, dyed salmon-color Sake Sushi, deep red Tekka Maki and cool green Kappa Maki. We were five hundred miles from the nearest ocean.

*

I guess I am more comfortable now with American food. In my previous Christmas food story, Hotel Aperio, I concentrated on British food, which is way funnier (though the story itself isn't).

November Full Moon

 

The full moon last week seemed to last forever. 

Morning of November 21st. 

Evening of November 18th. Moon in a misty sky over the sand processing plant and water reclamation works, Trampas Canyon, Orange County CA. 

History of Galivan, Orange County CA (Part 2)

The history of a place that today only exists on maps and GPS route finders. The subject of my Halloween story this year, here. 

Part 1 here. 

The US 101, now known as Camino Capistrano, continues next to the 1960-built I-5, which means the 74 on the right crosses over it on giant pillars to head towards the coast.  An In'n'Out Burger is just past this enormous structure. The remainder of the road continues to where the Galivan Overhead used to be. Then it simply stops. Dead ends in a sewage plant. The Galivan Overhead was removed in 1960. Why was this useful bridge removed? The web says that there was a certain amount of slope instability in the area, repairs weren't working, so off it went.

The next part of the 101 ended up under Cabot Road and the AA pages will tell you the rest of its course.

Camino Capistrano (101). Cabot Road to the upper left. Oso Pkwy freeway crossing ahead.

Galivan, after which the bridge was named, is still on the map. The pushpin on the map does not point to the place where the bridge was, but a little further south. There is nothing there but a few bushes and sycamores in the creek.

In my Halloween story I situated the ranch house on the other side of the tracks, north of the Galivan Overhead. There's no sign of where the "village" or whatever used to be. The fictional house could have been there and called the whole Galivan area its orchard.

 

Above, two views of “Galivan”, the spot indicated by Google, October 2021.

Galivan was marked on old maps as just north of a windmill. There's a windmill in the same place today.

Here’s a portion of a 1949 Map from via oldmapsonline.org

It looks something like this today. The windmill is to the right of the white tent. 

Above, the windmill, October 2021

Above: looking from the Galivan GPS marker across Camino Capistrano (101) and across the train tracks, towards Cabot Road.

AA Roads website user DTComposer says, "US-101 did run along Cabot, then transitioned to Camino Capistrano via a crossing over the railroad that is no longer there. It was just south of current Los Oso Parkway; Historical Aerials can show you this."

Since it took me half an hour to get Historical Aerials to show me that, below is a small screen capture of the 1946 view. It has the advantage of an overlay showing the modern road names. 

As for the steam train whistle stop in my Halloween story, it was mentioned in the Mission Viejo Reporter, October 2019.

(That doesn't look like the bridge near the Mugs Away Saloon to me.)

And finally, modern Galivan pushpin on an ordinary computer GPS directions map, below. (Retrieved 10/24/21)

 

History of Galivan, Orange County CA (Part 1)

 

I've often wondered about a rumored local place, Galivan. It appears on the GPS maps as you drive past it, but just floats there – the marker isn't over a building or a town.  It's such an odd thing that it even has its own Wikipedia entry. (I wrote a short story about the map marker, here.)

The pushpin is marking a spot that may (or may not) have once been a village, whose only hold on history is a railroad bridge that was built there in 1928.

The bridge, called the Galivan Overhead, was built by M E Whitney who designed the Del Mar crossing in San Diego the year before. Galivan was apparently similar to the earlier bridge. I can't find a good pictures of either of them but here's a couple of extant photos.

The picture above is the Galivan Overhead, from a website article by Carl Nelson, P.E.

It may be similar to the Del Mar crossing but I can’t find a normal picture of that either. An unusual picture of the Del Mar crossing appears below:

Below, from a US Highways page, a picture of the approach to the Galivan overhead. The older approach is just to the right of the bridge and a more modernized one swings to the right of the photograph. Sadly, it's an undated photo.  Was it changed at the same time Santa Fe paid to realign the railroad in 1941 or was it done at a different time? The new approach looks a lot safer.

 Below is what the Galivan Overhead looked like from, er, overhead, just before and just after it was removed. The huge road being constructed to the right of it is the I-5 in Southern Orange County, CA.

The website US 101 Photo Gallery South Orange County says of the picture, "Construction of the San Diego Fwy over Oso Creek near the Galivan Separation. The old alignment at left was three lanes wide and crossed a bridge built in 1928. The freeway is now part of the 10-lane wide I-5 while the separation and much of old 101 has been buried under new development."

Above is the same road, just after the bridge removal in 1960.  The cut-off section, top-middle-left, is now under Cabot Road.

There is a webpage about the US 101, the  AA Roads web page. It says that just south of here, the 101 "turned inland via present Camino Capistrano through eastern Dana Point and San Juan Capistrano, intersecting SLR-64/present California 74 at Ortega Highway in downtown SJC. Continued north on Camino Capistrano, which runs between present Interstate 5 to the east and the Metrolink (former Santa Fe) rail line to the west. Original concrete-railed bridges dating from the mid-1930's can be found on Camino Capistrano between Crown Valley and Oso Parkways immediately west of the Interstate 5 alignment. Immediately north of Oso Parkway the route crossed over the Santa Fe tracks, subsequently following Cabot Road north to La Paz Road. At that point the alignment veered to the northwest away from the rail line; this section was completely subsumed by the present Interstate 5, which continued to overlay the original 1924 alignment, called Trabuco Road north of La Paz Road, to the location of the present Interstate 5/CA-133 interchange."

At least one concrete bridge remains along Camino Capistrano at this end. The one next to the Mugs Away Saloon has the date 1938 stamped in the concrete.

The US 101 just north of San Juan Capistrano was moved in 1941 for a railroad realignment. The "new" concrete of 1941 is several feet above and to the East of the old road.

 

Above: US 101 shortly after the realignment in 1941. The old 101 is down at the bottom, by the creek and the railroad. Some of this area, closest to town, was very recently (last two years) built over.  New railroad line has taken care of most of the rest.

This is a similar view on October 29, 2021.  The above-grade road on the right is the 73 just peeling off the I-5 (not seen). The concrete barrier between the 5 and 73 and the 101 (here called Camino Capistrano) is to stabilize the slope.

It's not stabilizing it quite well enough to stop the drainage washing out the old concrete, however. Not sure who I report this damage to.

Current subsidence of Camino Capistrano, above. 

Another old view from the same webpage, below:

The 1941 realignment is to the right. The old alignment is to the left. The railroad cut through it.

View from Camino Capistrano, October 29, 2021

End of part one

Part two here.

Harvest at Galivan - Halloween short story

Almost midnight. The phone screen shines like an icon above the altar of his dashboard. The map centers I-5 and Alicia Parkway, nine miles north. Constellations of red taillights shuffle ahead. Blinding blue-white headlights stream beyond the median. A word floating behind Gorilla Glass summons the driver’s attention. Galivan. The font and color suggest a city, but he’s never heard of it. Never seen the word before. Curiosity aroused, the driver speaks to the GPS.

“Hey, Google, Galivan.”

The map recenters. A red pushpin appears, its tip pointing to a void, a lack of features, between Camino Capistrano and the I-5. It’s not a city. It’s not a business.

Radio fades and the map verbalizes a command. “Take the next exit, Junipero Serra.”

He obeys. The radio volume swells; “Radar Love.” He clicks it off. The map swings as he turns the wheel.

“Right onto Camino Capistrano in eight hundred feet.”

His body reacts smoothly, instinctively, to the murmured instruction. He’s heading north once more. The lights of San Juan Capistrano illuminate the clouds behind him. Empty hills like charcoal fog loom on the left. His original route, the freeway, paces him on the right. Asphalt gives way to twin-slab concrete and his tires hammer a cardiac rhythm as they pass over the regular gaps in the cement. He slows to relieve the frantic drumming. He recalls that this road was once the US 101, made redundant by the freeway in 1960. The slabs are early 40s, with fewer potholes than city asphalt replaced last year. The thought makes him smile without humor.

“Straight on for five miles.”

He knows this road. There’s an In-n-Out Burger crouching between the Brutalist pillars of the hulking 73, which will lurch over his head in a moment. There’s an A’s Burgers, Avery Parkway, the canted spiral of Paseo De Colinas jabbing up the sinistral hills. Soon, a lengthy wasteland of car dealerships will interpose between his road and the freeway. Laguna Niguel station, on the Santa Fe railroad that parallels this road for miles, will appear to larboard.

The toll road does not rise at his right. His nose detects no grilling burgers. It’s the correct route. He has spotted an old road sign, square, surmounted with a triple-A logo. US 101. He thought those old signs were all removed. He looks for Crown Valley Parkway, which must loft over this road about now. It doesn’t appear.

He sees brushwood where there should be car dealerships—vegetation along the creek? Is this Oso Creek? Where is the Mugs Away saloon? And if no boxy buildings block his view, why can’t he see freeway lights?

Higgledy-piggledy telegraph poles stand stark in the dull yellow headlights of an approaching car. A white Packard roadster, suicide doors, red interior, perfect condition for a fifties vehicle. Its driver waves.

The road veers to the left, uphill, becomes a bridge over the railroad tracks. He has the sensation of being truly lost. Camino Capistrano dead-ends before Oso Parkway. It does not cross the tracks. His grandfather worked on the railroad realignment. There has been no bridge here since before he was born.

He asks the map to recenter.

“Signal lost,” says the map.

By dead reckoning, he must be on Cabot Road. Costco has gone. No green glass edifices glittering in the streetlights.

No streetlights. And no freeway below. He’s never seen clouds at night unlit by city glow.

“Sharp right,” says the map.

“I thought you had no signal,” he says to it, absurdly grateful for a direction. He turns off the 101 and brakes, realizing in time that the unmetalled road hairpins through 320 degrees, taking him back along the lower slope of the hills to the west of the railroad. He’s heading south again. Where there was no road before, just a coyote trail through man-high mustard.

A black locomotive roars by, pulling orange freight cars, slowing as it reaches the bridge, whose pillars are now half a mile in front of him. The bridge that shouldn’t exist today. Steam billows in his headlights as the engineer leans on the whistle. The driver closes his eyes briefly. When he opens them, it is still a steam engine, stopped, awaiting fresh water from an overhead device.

“Your destination is on the right,” the GPS says. The map is blank—no roads shown. A ranch house is nestled in a triangle of land between the long-buried 101 above, the steam train whistle-stop below and the long-demolished Galivan Overhead bridge ahead.

A man comes down the gravel path. “Howdy!” he says. In his headlights, the driver sees he carries a rifle. Casual, not aimed.

“I’m lost,” the driver says, getting out of the car.

“You’re in my grove—Galivan,” the man replies.

The driver’s eyes search in vain for trees.

“The ‘41 rail realignment took my alligator pears. The freeway took my orange grove.” The man is still angry about it. “When they felled my trees, I built an altar. I lit a sacred fire for Pomona. I begged her to restore my trees. She could not. Her domain is time and season; the land is not hers to apportion. But she ensures her followers will not starve. There is always a harvest.” He raises the rifle. “She worked her will on the calendar instead. Each year the roads revert and signposts return, and the sons of the railroad builders blunder into Galivan.”

*

Look for Galivan floating on your dashboard map. Don’t tell Google to calculate a route, unless you want to hang in the cold-room there, a hook through your ankle, your lifeblood running in the gutter set in the floor.

What we did on our holidays

 

When I was a kid in the 60s, my parents used to love driving holidays. They were both rationalists and atheists (though if I were to write this in a memoir, I feel my sister might have some objections; she was of the opinion that they were both Church of England. Of course, that's basically atheist in itself). A good day's drive for my parents was a trip to Science Museum A, ruined abbey B, Science Museum C, Botanic Gardens D, a few minor science museums and a couple of cultural/historical buildings.

After one particularly grueling visit to several ruined abbeys and a culture museum featuring motley-clad peasant-role-players making beer and sackcloth in a wattle-and-daub building in a marsh, we arrived at our chosen hotel for the night. Pre-Yelp, of course, it had been chosen from a listing in a magazine. Inspection of the frontage was positive. It was large, and well-appointed and did not have any noticeable markers of unsuitability. It was after dark, and I was a child, so the contents of the car, and I, were bundled up in anoraks, windcheaters, fleeces, overcoats and etcetera and hustled straight past the front desk to a tiny, whitewashed room furnished with a double bed and a truckle bed. It was at least thirty degrees below freezing (in my mind). The 40 watt bulb in the room was not sufficient for much (and remember, in those days, no wifi or cable TV in rooms). I elected to go straight to bed and eventually thawed out sufficiently to go to sleep.

I was awakened by my parents suddenly talking loudly. It was about five in the morning – not yet light. The dim bulb was switched on and the two of them excitedly conversed in bed. I managed to fall asleep again, and in the first light, my parents dragged me out and into the grounds of the hotel.

"This way, through the hedge and down the stairs," my mother said.

"Then left through the field and towards the wooden bridge," my dad said.

It dawned on my, slowly, that they had both had the exactly the same dream. A woman in white had come to each one and asked for help. She had lit a lamp and led them through the hotel, into the grounds and down to the river.

Both had woken up at the same time.

My parents were still staunch materialists afterward, but neither of them were able to explain how they had both correctly dreamed of the path from the hotel room down to the bridge over the rushing river, and neither ever discussed what the White Lady had wanted from them.

Square eyes, kaleidoscope eyes (Rob Young's Magic Box)

I loved Rob Young's Electric Eden, on the massive and influential British folk-rock scene, and was mildly looking forward to his Magic Box. This review may have cooled me off a little, however.

I'm aware that for many people I know (at least on Facebook) "Folk Horror" is the vast hyphal network that undergirds the subconscious of the British people. On investigation, I found it consisted of Ben Wheatley's A Field In England, two public safety films about drowning in creeks from 1971, The Children of the Stones and Witchfinder General. Oh, and the Wicker Man, obvs. Christopher Bray, the reviewer, seems to agree with me, although Magic Box author Rob Young managed fill up the other 499 pages so I guess there must be more of it out there somewhere.

The reviewer gets all the best lines, even if they're someone else's (Irene Handl's "Who of?" and Steve Martin's “I remember when I had my first beer”), along with spotting a number of alternative facts in the book. I'm still considering buying the book. Well, maybe borrowing it.

I wouldn't have posted to say this, however, if Christopher Bray hadn't said,

"Like the Beatles’s “girl with kaleidoscope eyes”, Young sees patterns everywhere."

That gave me one of those startling moments when one's whole world momentarily does a Necker cube thing. I'd always assumed the girl had eyes, which if you looked at them, appeared as kaleidoscope patterns. It turns out that the girl has eyes, which if she looks out of them, see the world as kaleidoscope patterns. Whoah. (I believe that is the correct expression to use.)

I have had an episode of ocular migraine myself (just the one, thankfully) and I know exactly how that looks. I'd just never considered it before.

The Dead Weather - Will There Be Enough Water? (United Record Pressing)

Doctors and nurses to researchers and lab techs

 I'd just like to ignore the massive point of this Rolling Stone article on Republican efforts to deny health care to people it doesn't like, and concentrate on its made-up hierarchy of medical providers, which puts "lab techs" last. 

We Clinical Laboratory Scientists are professionals too. Seventy percent of medical decisions are based on lab results. Without us and our expertise, doctors would be all, "Your pulse is thready and you have lung sounds, rales and rhonchi. You either have a sucking chest wound or a nickel allergy. Take two leeches and call me in the morning, if you're still breathing."

A Flutter

 

In 1967, when I was 8, I won big on a horse race. The Grand National is Britain’s most famous and most chaotic race. Anything can happen. Our household had a tradition of picking a horse (by sticking a pin in the newspaper's list of runners at random) and betting a small amount—a “flutter”, it was called. I picked Foinavon, a no-hoper at 100:1 odds, and bet a shilling, one twentieth of a pound.

Late in the race, all the leading horses fell, or turned to get out of the carnage at the front of the race, tripped by a riderless horse ambling around in front of one of the fences. Plucky Foinavon, gamely cantering dozens of yards behind, had plenty of time to select a route through the empty horses and over the remaining fences. I won five pounds, to me at that time an unimaginable sum of money, and my mother said I should put it in a bank.

“What will the bank do with it?”

“They’ll put it in a book.”

“Won’t it make the book lumpy?”

“Of course not,” she said, not kindly, assuming my complete ignorance of book-keeping was an attempt at snark.

My mother was a bookkeeper, the person whose job was to keep the ledgers of company transactions in order so that they could be certified by an accountant later. These handwritten, maroon leather-bound books had to be prepared carefully, legibly, and completely, without crossing-outs or erasures that could be interpreted as a sign of fraudulent changes, so that the debit side and credit side totted up to the same amount. Any discrepancies had to be chased down, notated and signed. I didn’t have any idea this activity took place, and neither do you, because computers keep accounts up to date invisibly, behind the scenes these days.

Yorkshire Bank from Google Street View 2016

I took the five pound note the bookie gave my mother to the Yorkshire Bank on the main commercial street of Batley, my little hometown. It’s called Commercial Street, in the thuddingly obvious way that streets are named when they’ve been there forever. The bank teller took the bill and entered it into his book—in writing. The bill itself was put in a drawer, so as not to make the book lumpy. I was given a little ledger of my own to record my deposits and withdrawals, and a check book, which I don’t believe I ever used. I do remember that a short time later I came into another small fortune —I found a pound note in a field, with a sheep-shaped bite out of it. After much form-filling, the Bank of England replaced it with an unbitten bill, and I deposited it in the same bank.

Yorkshire Bank building for sale, Google Street View

On Saturday, wrapped-up in my post-lockdown home in Southern California, where I’ve lived for more than half my life, I read about that town, and about the Yorkshire Bank on Commercial Street.  The bank was disused and shuttered, the doors boarded up, and the property had been on the market for four years without a buyer. 

The police broke through the boards and entered the property to search it. They found the body of a bus driver, who had been kidnapped in nearby Bradford and murdered. His alleged killers were arraigned in court yesterday, a couple of years after his body was found, and the BBC news article showed a picture of the boarded-up doors of my bank, where my lucky winnings had been deposited. Over a gulf of fifty-three years, I recalled walking in there to entrust my cash to the man behind glass who put it in a drawer and gave me a book of handwritten numbers in return. Somewhere behind his counter, a murdered man had lain for almost a week. And then the doors were sealed again with metal plates replacing the plywood, and there would be no more Yorkshire Bank memories to come for anyone.

New short story from me in upcoming Interzone magazine

 

Image: Interzone Cover art

Cover and contents are works in progress

Interzone 290-291 is coming soon from TTA Press. 

Even better, it's a fiction only double issue--192 pages!--with fiction from yours truly, Lyle Hopwood. 

Beautiful cover art: The Street of Our Lady of the Fields by Vincent Sammy

Modern science fiction and fantasy fiction by Alexander Glass, Cécile Cristofari, me, Tim Major, Matt Thompson, David Cleden, and many others.

Interzone is going through some changes but you can order single issues (or in this case a double issue) from TTA Press below. If you're already a subscriber, you'll continue to receive issues as planned. 

Order your copy here.