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.
