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.