Paul’s one regret about blowing a year’s pay on his pick-up was that he hadn’t done it sooner. Racing away from campus, blasting Talking Heads, feeling the power in his forearm as he slung the truck into fourth, it was hard to believe he’d ever taken the bus, ever hitched rides to field stations, ever been anywhere except behind the wheel of his glorious truck.
At the end of the term, he packed a duffel for a summer at Vandenberg. On the road, he exchanged waves with big rig drivers: brotherhood. He rolled down the windows to shout into the wind.
In the field Paul was studying coastal sage scrub, which had once dominated California’s coastal vegetation. But his scrub was being actively smothered by iceplant, transplanted from South Africa to stabilize embankments along the state’s freeways. Iceplant was cool to the touch, with small purple flowers; an impolite guest, overstepping the bounds of hospitality. Paul watched with suspicion and admiration.
Coastal sage scrub shed its soft gray-green leaves during the dry summer. Paul was watching to see how the encroaching iceplant might affect this process. Plants were not docile, passive objects: they occupied each other’s soil, fought for air and nutrients, colonized; plants like kudzu were hell-bent on global domination. Think of the language of his field: invasion.
“But that’s only our word for what plants do,” Sarah had said. “A man’s word, probably.”
“That’s what they do,” Paul said. “Take iceplant.”
“Not iceplant again.”
After three years, he’d begun to feel Sarah pulling away from him, disentangling herself, but it had seemed to Paul that between them was a sort of elastic that would allow this stretching—even allow her to move away, to Palo Alto—before snapping them back together. Now he recognized the power of more proximal men who could help Sarah move into her new apartment, chat with her at a café. He ought to have bought his truck months ago, and visited on weekends, as he explained in the repetenant letters he wrote her on the pages of his field notebook.
Now, at his campsite, Paul’s white-gas stove boiled water full of dancing pasta. It was mostly pasta when he camped: alternating nights of butter or tomatoes. Either recipe took a hefty dose of the powdered parmesan-like substance from the nearest market, which overcharged and rarely re-stocked as it had no competition. Paul ate his dinner in large forkfuls. The sunlight was fading quickly. He glanced back at his tent, where a lantern and his field notebook were waiting.
He could imagine Sarah up north, being approached by a café guy. Sarah would tell him straight off, “I have a boyfriend.”
The suitor, brash, would look around. “Oh yeah? Where is he?”
“He’s in LA.”
“What’s he doing there, when you’re up here?”
She would have to smile. “Pretty much watching the grass grow. Pretty much, exactly, watching the grass grow.”
To which the young man could only say, “I’d rather watch you.”
And, although he knew that Sarah would never fall for such an obvious line, Paul too would prefer Sarah to iceplant: he hadn’t realized that it would be one or the other.
But Tony was inevitable. Tony had studied classics, like Sarah, and he spoke ancient Greek. “No one speaks ancient Greek,” Paul said. “No one knows how they pronounced it.”
“Well, he knows it then, okay?” she said. This was before she had asked him about seeing other people. Tony was just a ride to IKEA, to furnish the new apartment. But he was proximal.
In the adjacent RV lot, trailer windows shone into the night. Paul could hear the murmur of his neighbors’ conversations. One couple sat outside their camper at a canopied card table, laughing and sharing a thermos. The small of chicory floated to him. In the mornings he made himself a packet of instant coffee, but it never tasted anything but thin and false.
Most of coastal California, Paul had written in his research proposal, lay within a Mediterranean climate, with cool dry summers and warm wet winters. This climate was also found in Chile, southwestern Australia, South Africa. The vegetation in each looked remarkably similar, though composed of quite distantly related species. In these similar climates the plants had converged their growth habits and life histories.
Did people, Paul wondered as he washed his dinner dishes, do the same thing? A woman in Seville might come to resemble one in San Diego – one a librarian, the other a bookseller – perhaps to date and marry on the same cycle, even to favor the same type of man. Perhaps Paul himself had a counterpart in Athens, an unassuming man most at ease with books and plants.
On the short walk to the shore, Paul thought about joining the Peace Corps, which had always seemed to him to be a noble endeavor: building bridges, teaching algebra. Perhaps he would send in one of those postcards outside the graduate office. Paul knew it was the students, not the faculty, who were supposed to entertain these fantasies—and yet.
His jacket was back in his tent, he remembered, clutching his arms in the cold. The wind came straight off the ocean. Paul steeled himself and sat down on a large sand dune. He gripped his beer bottle and gulped.
Strips of rain blew ashore. The ocean changed color: icy blue, then dirty green, brown, ash gray. In the near-dark, the whitecaps were brilliant. Paul set his beer into a hollow in the sand.
Sitting on the dune, there might have been nothing else in the world but the Pacific, the wind, and the rain. Silence lurked just under the constant roar of the surf and the murmuring siss of wind over sand. He remembered Sarah’s warm body, her scent, the texture of her skin. The sensations were gone as quickly as the bands of rain that swept ashore, and in their absence all he felt was his own cold skin coated in preservative brine. It was easy, Paul thought, to scare yourself, on a dune watching the Pacific on a dark moonless night.
