Elephant Hills

        The air was heavy with the smells of spring as I and my crew returned briskly along Route 119 to the San Joaquin Basin from the Central Coast of California. The crew of whom I speak consisted of two youngsters, Bill and John, the latter the younger of the two, and my sweetheart, Celeste. The coastal menagerie of the area we had just visited was still fresh in our minds as we traversed the miles that would eventually end at the orange trees of Maricopa, a small oil town 40 miles or so from Bakersfield. It seemed to me ironic that orange trees would thrive in the small town with its hot, dry climate, located in the southwestern corner of this huge inland valley, once a drainage basin for a number of large California rivers. Long ago. Before the developers came.

        The air along Route 119 was bright and clear and snuffing it up our nostrils, clean and pure and wondrous. As we passed through the tiny Cuyama Valley community, a community located just before the big drop down Grocer Grade into the basin, I thought to myself, "Ah, me, it is exciting to be alive!" The bucolic nature of the landscape which surrounded our buzzing automobile set me at peace with the world, and it seemed as though life was always meant to be this way: a birdland of trilling melodies sung vaingloriously to the God of Beauty and Truth. Farmers in their fields; Jack Frost a distant memory.

        And then, dipping finally into the ancient water cache, Los Angeles came to us in a rush. It didn't sneak up on us, a clandestine garbageman seeking to quietly empty in the early morning hours the round containers of human waste. It blared at us loudly, filling our senses with the filth and rot of men gone mad over the notion of wealth--the security of money. Blackish, billowing clouds of noxious odors and redundant petroleum residues greeted our descending vehicle, wrapping us in the malaise of modern man: pollution.

        I remembered living here in Maricopa as a child. How sweet the air was then. One could clearly see the Tehachapi Mountains and the ranges of surrounding hills, as well. I remembered reading Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" and thinking that the hills around this place of orange trees were reminiscent of that descriptive title. I wish I would see them now. Those hills. To confirm once again that they really were unreal, like a painting of the flanks of white elephants at pause--unreal like that, beautiful despite their barren, dusty slopes, valueless and nude and outlined by a sky so blue one wondered how that hue could possibly have been created.

        No more. Now the sky was colored a lifeless brown, a haze that blotted from view and, eventually, from memory that blue so blue that it once burned its tint deeply into the biological soup of the surrounding land. Brown where once was blue, filtering the sun's rays harshly so that the eye perceived a different landscape, a melancholy landscape, a landscape made, in a sense, opaque by the brown blot of humankind floating ugly in the air.

        But the ugly is what has prevailed. Men in their ultimate wisdom have decided that this part of California should properly be the repository of all manner of lethal garbage generated by a generation of men bent on its own destruction. Lamentations aside, the reality of the brown stared at us with a reality that even the fabled Ulysses could ne'er undo. And why should he deign to help a society whose gasps and fits are of its own making?

        I miss those hills like white elephants. I miss them now. I'm afraid I'll miss them forever.