Diluted

When I first visited my grandfather’s house, it was green with life. But one summer, it faded to yellow, the color of humidity. Dead grass and plums. His avocado tree had stopped yielding fruit. The only thing that still stood was his grapefruit tree, the branches weeping out from wilting limbs, leaves billowing to the ground, a shield from the sun.

On our way to his house, my grandfather pointed to the other side of the highway. I looked across the concrete railing. Cars were almost embracing each other. They stood at a standstill--toy replicas.  My grandfather explained why the lanes were so congested. A bridge had collapsed because of the rain. Shoddy engineering, he said, “but who could have predicted it. The rain I mean.” He told me about the torrent. He told me about how the rain pooled and was swallowed by the dehydrated ground. The highway seemed fine now, no rain residue, but I wondered if the cars were driving toward the bridge or had avoided it already. I imagined the California cars flocking around the newly made river-ravine, sending honks of encouragement to the stonework to reform into a previous mold, to resume looming over the water, keeping it under control.

The water tastes different here, rubbery. The result of the difference between the amount of minerals they put in their water and the amount I am used to. I noticed the grit as my step-cousin Nick, my uncle, and I drank bottles from a 3,000-foot altitude. Taste like rocks slicked my throat. We were high enough to see the welding point of the green Pacific and horizon point. We showered the water that we didn’t drink into the mouth of my uncle’s dog, Otis. We hiked on the summit of the mountain for an hour, our shoes licking up the cracked dirt to gum our feet for the day. This mountain was the backbone of Santa Barbara, the town my uncle lived in, and he decided that we should travel up there. He enjoyed pointing out spots in the landscape, thrusting an index toward a park or the boardwalk. After eyeing the town, we turned to look toward the other side of the mountain: the one facing away from the town and the sea. Here, the ground was not as green. Stripes of gray and yellow strangled the peaks. My uncle told me the pattern was caused by the wildfires.

“It’s hard to solve the problem. The firemen can’t get water up to this height easily,” my uncle told me. “They can’t climb up the mountain.”

“They don’t fit in the lanes?” I asked.

“Yeah. They’d run off the sides.” I imagined the fire trucks hugging the walls of the mountain, flailing against the bends, and turning back down. The firemen watching as wildfires cleaved rings around the mountain. My uncle ran out of water eventually, and we decided to leave. We climbed back into my uncle’s car and carefully descended the mountain. We were like the firemen. We were not able to help with the amounts of water we had.

I hadn’t seen my family in California for five years.. My grandfather had shrunk and his hands shook more. My uncle seemed angrier, more controlling and never present. He would be up doing chores, lighting fires, making desserts while the rest of his family ate and sat on the patio, turned seawards. My mother was worried for him and the family. She asked me to check on him while I was there.

I lay on the couch in my cousin Chris’s room where I had been sleeping for the past week. His blinds were broken in various spots, and only my eyes and feet baked in the sunlight. I couldn’t remember how long I had slept, but the dog was with me. I remember my uncle letting Otis in. He told me I needed some company and let the dog scramble across the carpet, guided by the slice of light framed by the door. Otis sat on Chris’s empty bed, eyes closed, boring an indent into the mattress. Chris had been gone for the past two days. I remember waking as he  slammed the door late at night and then again in the morning. I told myself jokingly that he only came home to drink water. My uncle had been trying to get Chris and me to interact the whole week, but his effort had not worked out for him. The more he pushed, the more Chris resisted, and the longer he stayed away from the house. My uncle was angry, doing more errands and staying away from the house. He was like Chris, avoiding the root of the problem by leaving. “Are you angry that he is never here?” he asked me one night while in the kitchen. He leaned against the fridge and adjusted the pictures of his kids. I didn’t want to answer yes or no. I shrugged, though he wasn’t satisfied with the answer. He turned away, gave Otis a treat, and went to watch a movie. I felt more indifferent than anything. I couldn’t fault Chris, and I was fine being alone. An hour earlier, as he ripped into salmon at dinner, my uncle asked me what I thought of California.

“It’s so much different from Connecticut, I bet,” he told more than asked me. He took a bite. My cue.

“I guess.” I said. “It’s hotter.”

“Yeah, some think this place is all palm trees and beach. It’s an El Niño year, gonna rain more than usual. Places are going to be a mess. There was flooding in the LA area the last time it rained. We just don’t have the tools to deal with it.”

Otis jumped off Chris’s bed and scratched at the door. I pushed my feet out of the sunlight first, and then my face. I sat on the middle seat of the couch. I missed having a patch of warmth on my cheek, but I got used to it. I opened the door for Otis and padded down to the kitchen, trying not to make any noise against the creaky hardwood flooring. My efforts didn’t really matter though. Chris was gone. One step-child slept through the day, and the other left early to surf. I grabbed a cup, filled it with water from the fridge, and went back to the room. I took a sip. It was cold against my throat, but I recoiled at the hard, gritty taste. I drank the whole thing, turned on the TV, muted it, and watched the subtitles. The only noise came from Otis’s tail pounding the ground like a metronome.

My uncle and I were on our way to UCSB  by car when he turned on the radio, just catching the words, “Tainted water, oil spill off the coast.” After minutes of listening, he repeated to me that the spill was up ahead and visible from a nearby beach. He exited the highway. We parked in a sandy lot and watched camera crews set up in front of the leak. They were preparing for the shot of a reporter standing in front of a blue ocean, pointing at the black oil swallowing up the water.  

The house was silent and I was the only person in it. My uncle had gone on a long bike ride, taking Otis with him. He was a patent lawyer, and as a result, his work was flexible.  I looked outside of Chris’s window and could see the ocean. Pure green. Watching waves, I thought about how the Pacific was greener than the Atlantic, wondered if the cause was the pollution--the Pacific bearing burdens of plastic and smoke pouring out from the cities along the coast. Even so,  I thought about how lucky Chris was to be able to see the throbbing waves and spitting rocks. Its beauty in movement. I walked onto the patio and considered calling my parents, but I decided to rest instead. Sitting on a patio chair, I thought about how differently Chris and I used our freedom. He often left, while I stayed in the same place. There were times when Chris and I moved together. We would run down to the beach in a unit, walking along the sand until the beached tar would paint our feet black. We would wash our feet together in the water spewing from the hose in front of his house. I thought about how different our families are. His seemed dysfunctional to me--angry and always leaving, even though they were all in one place. My family lived as if on an island--the East Coast. My uncles, cousins, and grandparents lived tightly knit in the West. I turned the patio chair around to face the ocean. There was a highway nearby, and I heard the cars trudge and belch smog. Overshadowing it all was the gurgling sound of the backyard pond--murky and black with algae, spitting new water into the well.