I’m watching a horsefly circle our room in a panic.  He came in through the open window, can’t get out again.  Do you ever want to tell insects to just slow down a moment, to look at their surroundings, to remember that if they got in, surely they can get out?  Last night as I sat on the toilet a moth came suddenly alive on the wall beside me.  When we were nine or ten, a friend of mine who had rescued a dying bird from the old bathtub in her mother’s garden and was now trying to capture a bug to feed the patient had a moth fly into her eye.  She shrieked, ran in circles like the horsefly.  After we laughed about it.  You have a moth in your eye.

Things, in that cyclical way that they work, need repairing again.  My bicycle, my computer.  We need to mop the stairs, hoover the hallway.  I forget that the objects in my life, the major ones, need as much attention as the people in my life sometimes.

Yesterday after work, even though it was Friday, even though it was a glorious day, all sun-and-clouds-and-wind, I found myself in a state of deep despair.  Every human interaction seemed a transgression.  I started to hate people, hate things, in equal and powerful measure.  The streets turned ugly and mean.  Women handing out flyers, beggars with their lopsided eyes and plaintive cries, schoolgirls in slutty skirts sharing illicit cigarettes on the circus that is Cornmarket in the afternoon, a lone man with a deep voice standing in the center of the crowd, saying, you must embrace Jesus, or all is lost.

So I did the only thing I could think of: I went home.  This is more complicated than it sounds.  The ride, along the High street, round the roundabout, up the wind tunnel of the Iffley Road, along uneven, potholed James Street, is familiar enough.  It’s been memorized, done at every conceivable hour, in every conceivable season, in rain, flurries of snow, rare and undiluted summer sunshine, but it’s more about a state of mind than knowing a route and coming to the end of it.  At home I felt ill at ease even in the study, my usual sanctuary: the view into the garden only put me in mind of things to do.  I needed to burrow deeper into the nest.  So I went upstairs, into the bed, even though the hour did not warrent this.  Under the duvet.  Received, as I lay listening to the windowpane rattle in the springtime gale, a message from the Man that put my mind at ease enough to drift into sleep, and when I awoke it was because it was his footsteps on the stairs, his presence in the doorway, his body next to mine.  And how comforting, later, to walk down the road to our pub, to see friends and then have dinner in our neighborhood.  To feel a sense of ownership all the way from late afternoon to late-at-night.  To lie giggling like children in bed after midnight.

***

This morning I awake thinking of the first apartment I had in Boston.  Two years of dormitory living, tiny, stinking communal showers, no kitchens, wizened mice snacking at students’ discarded potato chips, sounds of sniffles, phone calls, drunkeness, DVDs and music, careless, inept sex.  I sought refuge in the views from windows, of bridges stretched across the Charles River, of seasonal beauty in the botanic gardens.  I’ve never been quite so lonely as I felt those first two years, living in disgustingly close proximity to hundreds of other disillusioned youths.

That first apartment, in Kenmore Square, was too expensive for what it was; an impulsively signed lease at the end of the semester.  A one-bedroom converted into a two-bedroom, so that the living room was only a strip of hallway, the kitchen only a black-and-white tiled place to stand and eat toast in the mornings, gazing out at the tip of the Prudential Building piercing a dynamic Boston sky.  But I loved it anyway.  Up three flights of creaky, carpeted stairs, a hovel of my own, with views of my own choosing.  Custom shelves installed crudely by the man the realty company sent to repaint in September.  There was a moment, I remember this moment so clearly, in early September.  A week after I’d moved in, perhaps.  Boston still shedding the heat of summer, but with characteristic grace, so that the days, slightly windy, unbelievably clear, felt almost too mild, too gentle, to be true.  I’d been out with a friend, having lunch perhaps, and I came into my apartment, opened the bedroom window, sat on my new futon bed, felt this strange elation.

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The last time I was here: two years ago, almost to the day.  A good friend and I meet for a drink this time, late in the evening, at the bar of the same hotel we stayed in then.  I am, as always, delighted by the circular.  Still there seems suddenly to be a strange disconnect between my life in Oxford and my being here.  I feel in-between.  This is not a place I’ve ever called home (Boston or California, say), but not a place completely new to me, either.  I am in my own country, but things that used to seem prosaic now delight me (lemon flavored iced tea, Smartfood, Banana Republic).  

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My knowledge of electricity is so poor that I can’t even tell you what’s gone wrong with ours, only that something has. A lightbulb upstairs burned bright for a moment, there was a popping sound, and all the lights went out. We still have electricity–plug-in lights work, computers are charging happily–but our house is dark and here I sit, on the couch, having hunted for the fuse box and failed. It’s just too dark to look for a fuse box. Kind of a catch-22, that. Are we horrible people if we leave it till morning? Don’t answer that.

What I can’t decide is if I should, in present circumstances, escape by having a run. Because here’s the problem: it’s also dark outside the house. Not much of an escape; but at least I could feel the night city air on my face and pretend I had a glowing house to come home to. Here the light from candles flickers and the orange glow of streetlamps patterns the curtains, forms blocks on the walls. It’s a strange in-between feeling. I’m almost too restless to sit still; almost to restless to move.

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“A society built on quicksand, where everyone is getting new lives every day”
Pico Iyer, on California, in The Global Soul

On a hot night, we drive to L.A. and back. I have never been to downtown Burbank before; it is two hours and a thousand worlds away from where we start. Entire city blocks taken up with lots for shooting films and television shows; the day dims its lights just as we enter the city and we get lost trying to find a single house.

On the drive back, we dip down through the San Fernando Valley—a thousand sparkling lights, my favorite view, as a kid, coming from Orange County to Santa Barbara. We stop at an In N’ Out Burger. I haven’t been to one in years but it tastes just the same, and I remember the night I graduated from high school, and we had fries and milkshakes in cocktail dresses. There are a group of teenagers behind us; one of them, in a green shirt, keeps getting up to refill his soda cup. They say disparagingly about where they live, “It’s Camarillo.” They laugh at everything; they refresh us.

When we get near to Santa Barbara a voice on the radio warns of a fire nearby. Soon I am following a line of ten shiny firetrucks from Ventura; at Glen Annie, the northernmost exit before the netherland between Goleta and Buellton, they turn off and we see great orange flames peeking up over the tops of the hills. The sky, even at midnight, has a strange glow. Ahead of us is the ghost of a car: covered in ash, it cuts through the night looking like a specter.

Today the fire still burns. We taste wine in the Santa Ynez Valley and then take the San Marcos pass to Santa Barbara. Midway through a movie, the power shuts off all across the city. It is strange to see what happens to people when the lights go out. Soon we are all pooled outside in the parking lot being covered by a film of ash. “It looks like you have dandruff,” he says, as I brush some dust from his beard.

At the train station, waiting to pick someone up, we can see the fire. It has spread along the ridgeline. The mountains are alight. Flames crest the hills. It glows red in some spots, orange in others. “Welcome to California,” I say. On the radio, most people are talking about the power outage. A woman calls in to the university radio station and gives her perspective on the fire—“All the traffic lights are out,” she warns. She adds, “I’d like to see the National Guard home from Iraq so they can deal with things like this.”

“Welcome to Santa Barbara,” I say.

Sometimes in a traffic jam I let slip that I hate it here. “I could never live here,” I say, and honestly believe it; but later I doubt it very much to be true. It’s only that I feel a stranger here, sometimes; being in California is like watching one big movie, so that you know the characters but not the actors, and though the landscape is familiar, it feels incomplete, unreal. All that feels real are the places I have touched: the creekbed where I used to leap from bank to bank before the El Niño rains changed the shape forever, the hill at the front of the canyon that we climb to see the curve of the earth from, the hammock hung between two trees that the cows now use to rub their backs against.

I am a stranger even there, sometimes. Driving through the gate that marks the entrance to the Ranch, I am stopped by a guard who asks my name (I used to know all of them, and they me, but not any more), and when I tell it to him, he asks if I’m an owner.
“I don’t know,” I tell him; my ownership is all tied up in legalities and family rights—somewhere, deep down, the paperwork says I am, but all that matters in that moment is whether or not I feel like I own something, and I don’t.

He gives me a visitor’s pass. “It’s just a formality,” he tells me. He’s new at his job and doesn’t want to get into trouble. I see the Ranch with visitor’s eyes. On the back of the laminated pass is a list of rules; “no nudity in common areas,” reads one of them. “I never knew you couldn’t be naked in common areas,” I say.

But once, I was driving along the Ranch road when a rat appeared beside me in the truck, so I pulled over to try to get it out (I thought: if I can get it out, it won’t chew the wires!—they were always chewing the wires). I am a fairly small girl and it was a fairly large truck. I stood beside it on the side of the road, one door open, trying to coax the rat out by telekinesis (I had no better ideas). One of the gate guards came along, in his official truck.
“You ok?” he said.
“Just trying to get a rat out of my passenger seat,” I told him, wondering if he might take pity and offer to help.
“Ah, you’re a ranch girl, you’ll be fine!” he said, smiled, waved, moved on. Then the rat took a flying leap out of the truck and I shut the door before it could rethink the move. That was it: I was a ranch girl.

Now I am a girl who is a ranch girl and something else, too. I don’t know what.

The chaparral burns hot in the summer (50 years since it last burned, they say). And in five hours, on three quarters of a tank of gas, we can go from the wilds of a working cattle ranch to the urbane lots of Hollywood and back.

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