hour, and I could see the column of smoke was heavier toward El Segundo. An oil tank farm in flames? Waterborne Vietcong frogmen bringing the war home to America? KHJ was airing “In the Year 2525,” a whiny song I didn’t much care for, so I flipped around the dial, trying to pick up a news broadcast that accounted for the fire. I got some evangelical enthusiasm: “This is not our home. I say again: This is not our home.” Also chatter in Spanish, and lots of car ads. I almost rammed into a truck when I glanced up from changing the station to observe that the lane I was in had stopped moving. But I wasn’t any the wiser about the blaze.
Past Long Beach, black cloud behind me now, the freeway unclogged. When I departed the Gold Coast in June, the official estimate was that the San Diego Freeway would be pushed southward to at least MacArthur Boulevard by the end of summer. I decided to explore another day how far construction had actually reached and exited 405 where I usually did at Harbour Boulevard. After Harbour merged into Newport Boulevard, I powered down that until it teed at Pacific Coast Highway. I turned left.
The evening air was noticeably cooler by the water, and at a stop light on PCH I reached across and wound up the passenger window. I felt I should park for a moment and put on a shirt. This close to Laguna, though, I was anxious to reach my destination after the long, hot day in the saddle. I glanced up MacArthur Boulevard as I putt-putted by, thinking how after the weekend I’d be headed there to campus to reconnect with Janey, Professor Bulgy, the latest developments in SDS, and of course to start the two seminar courses I had signed up for this term. As well, I needed to check in with the university’s Information Office in case they could use me as a PR writer again this year. MacArthur Boulevard looked as it had when I left, except the four-lane was bathed in golden light from the sunset streaming between the palms and stores of Corona del Mar. At the junction of MacArthur and PCH, the Zoo Restaurant — famous for its half-pound of fries with every burger — appeared busy as ever.
Then I was out among the wheat-coloured hills of the Irvine Ranch that rolled down to greet the Pacific. To my right, the sinking sun glittered off rows of combers. Immediately before Laguna was a cove like an illustration in a travel brochure: a half-circle of house trailers set back amid palms along a wide, sandy crescent where high surf was breaking. I caught the reflected light off some boards in the water. Then I was steering by LAGUNA BEACH CITY LIMITS: pop. 12,510. Moments later I slowed to signal left onto Cajon Street, gearing into low to help the Volksie pant up the steep last fifty yards. I cut the engine by the mailbox at the top of the driveway to 283.
Clambering out of the car, I stood. The air was fragrant with citrus perfumes, thick with the sea and the moaning of doves. In the quiet spaces between the traffic rumbling along PCH, I could hear the barking of seals on the rocks at Shaw’s Cove, a few blocks below the highway.
I had found this two-storey rental cottage when I arrived at UC Irvine for my second year of grad studies. I occupied the upper floor for the school term, and in July and August the owners, who lived in Altadena, rented my apartment for as much per week as I paid per month.
The driveway down to the building was densely enclosed by banana palms, purple-and-red bougainvillea flowers, and additional subtropical foliage I couldn’t identify. An expanse of ice plant formed the shoulders of the pavement, which was used only as a walkway due to its nearly vertical descent. The past year a couple I knew from UCI had rented the bottom half of the cottage — he was a grad student in English. They were supposed to renew their lease this year like me, though there was no indication they had arrived back yet. At the bottom of the stairway up to my deck, an orange tree burdened with fruit promised me a juicy welcome home for tomorrow’s breakfast. The lemon tree nearby was laden with samples of its offerings each three times the size of any I could buy in the Frozen North. I climbed the steps, crossed the deck, and dug out of my wallet the key the landlords had mailed me a couple of weeks ago — on receipt of my first month’s cheque. The door opened into the stuffy living room.
I rented the place furnished, so it didn’t take me long to get settled. Before I began humping my stuff down from the Bug, I strode through the beamed front room toward the dining nook in the southwest corner of the place. Two large windows were shut together at right angles, and I pushed them open wide. Below, the view was the lane between Cajon and the adjacent street. But when I raised my eyes above cascades of flowering bushes in the neighbours’ backyards, the distant horizon line marked where ocean met sky. The house began to fill with the sea breeze.
Half an hour later I had the tent airing, draped over the porch rails and deck furniture. My portable typewriter and boxes of books were in the bedroom, which also featured a built-in desk. I’d dug out my Ho poster and a couple of other inspirational ones, and thumbtacked them to various walls. In the kitchen I excavated the interior of my cooler and stowed away in fridge and cupboards the food left over from the trip. Then I cobbled together a quick meal. While I ate I watched the last of the sun slip under the water.
I should have been exhausted. Instead I was buzzed from having arrived at last and unpacked. The phone couldn’t be hooked up until tomorrow, so there was no point in considering phoning Janey or anyone. A pay phone outside the liquor store just down PCH from Cajon was available, except I wasn’t sure if Janey was still at her folks’ in Fullerton, or had checked into residence on campus, or had decided to rent off-campus this year. I didn’t even know if we had the kind of friendship that would warrant a phone call the moment I reappeared in the area. I determined to wait until I saw her at school next week. My immediate plan was to stretch my legs, head over to Guantanamero Bay, and see if anybody was around. If not, I’d stop in at Beach Liquors to pick up a bottle of Almaden red, toast my return to the Gold Coast, and call it a night.
Evening light remained in the sky as I ambled down Cajon, darted across the highway, and strolled toward Shaw’s Cove. The heat of the day had considerably lessened, so before leaving my place I had slipped on over my T-shirt my usual cool weather attire in the Southland — a Canadian army field jacket. Many people around campus wore pieces of surplus military uniforms, but I guessed I had the only Canadian gear around. The khaki combat jacket displayed my SDS button over the left breast pocket, and a Mao button attached to the right.
As I neared Shaw’s Cove, the barks of the seals were louder, and I could hear the measured, relentless breaking of the surf. Chirping of various birds mixed with the coo-cooing of doves. I took deep breaths, relishing the bouquet of spicy scents from vegetation that crowded the front yards of homes along the streets.
Guantanamero Bay was a rambling wooden house above the beach that Edward and some others had rented the previous year and that Edward had managed to hang on to through the high-rent period of the summer. How the latter feat was accomplished was mysterious, but Edward himself was professionally mysterious. He was a few years older than most of us grad students, which made him twenty-six or twenty-seven. The degree he was pursuing was either in fine arts or anthropology, or maybe some combination. He was difficult to pin down. His favoured attire was Hawaiian shirts, and he may or may not have previously operated an art gallery in Honolulu, depending on what he hinted at different times. “I can neither confirm nor deny my ownership of an art gallery on the Islands,” he would respond when pressed for a definitive answer. He did admit to growing up in Encinitas, north of San Diego.
Edward had dubbed the house Guantanamero Bay, a conflation of the name of the U.S. military base on Cuba, Guantánamo Bay, and the title of the folksong “Guantanamera” made popular by Pete Seeger. The song, Edward had explained once, was based on a poem by the nineteenth-century Cuban revolutionary hero José Martí. No one quite got Edward’s point — was he pro-Cuban, which meant being, like me, pro-Castro and a fan of the late Che Guevara? Edward certainly was anti-war, having participated in a couple of demonstrations that I knew of. Yet he belonged to no peace or radical organizations. He merely smiled his mysterious smile when anyone asked him about his motivation for the
