Notes from the Future: Journal II

[Further selections from handwritten journal entries made some days after the quake.]

June 23

9 am

I am packed, Chauncey is in a travel box (hutch won't fit in car), I've got his food and Max's food and supplies and my computer and the important writing and my suitcase in the car. Two sleeping bags, pads, a day pack, my backpack with all its superb camping supplies; very glad I took the time in February to overhaul my JMT storage and supply area. I am ready to go, sitting on the couch, watching KQED. Most other stations aren't working, I still don't understand why. Trees of the Pleasanton Ridge have begun to burn, forest fire rages on those hills.

Veronica is not packed. She is angry, stomping, sullen and silent. Will not speak, will not answer my questions. Does not want to go. If she would speak to me, I believe her logic would be, 'Why should we go somewhere uncertain when we have four walls around us right here and now?' She wants to bring too much stuff. I say, pack for one week and one week only, we can launder what we have. Where we are going, there is no quake. There is no lake of fire where Stoneridge Mall used to be.

A woman gave birth to a baby on top of the West Dublin BART station. She had been in the pedestrian overcrossing when the flaming tide arrived, and she's been trapped in that station ever since; they went up to the roof to get away from the fumes. News copters flying around zoomed right in, full details; I think everyone with a TV must have been glued to it at that point. I hit the ceiling when our power went out right before the child was born; V and I both yelled, "Turn back on!" at the TV. It did. I wonder how many people in Livermore yelled those words at that moment. The baby and mother were picked up by a medical helicopter shortly thereafter; they are generally okay, but the baby is suffering from the fumes. The pilot disobeyed orders by picking them up and has been suspended. Of course.

V just came in and said, "So you're just going to sit there?" 

I responded that I'm packed and the house is secure and the garden is watered. Now it occurs to me that I should go talk to Larry, let him know our plans in case our landlords return soon.

10:30 am

I'm worried that I should have gone when the note was left. I am almost certain, now, that it was whoever the neighbors think looks like me. I have the strangest feeling, as though I'm watching my reflection move slightly out of sync with me. It's like being drunk and falling, for split seconds.

V is doing her hair. Her stuff is half-packed. She won't speak except to ask short, sharp questions aimed at starting an argument.  This is like that Christmas when I was ready to go, she was ready to go, but she wouldn't go because she was waiting on the arrival of something she'd ordered for me; she wouldn't tell me that, she wouldn't tell me anything. She was silent, silent, silent. This shit drives me crazy.  I've asked her what the problem is. She won't say. I even asked if she was waiting for some Christmas presents. She put down her brush and the hairspray and looked at me with the dead expression of the wrathful Kali.

I wish we owned a gun. Things are worse here than they should be. 

Water levels rise. Doesn't look possible to easily close up the gorge where 680 was. Some are speculating that this may be a permanent new addition to the geography of the Bay. The water has reached the Santa Rita exit of 580. I wonder what's going on at the jail. Yikes, say I. 

Now that we've been handed an escape route, I keep thinking about how I would get to Hayward. North Livermore to Highland Road to Tassajara and thence to Bollinger or Crow Canyon, taking one of the two Canyon roads over to unincorporated Castro Valley, then up the back way to Fairview or risk Kelly Hill. Jesus, I wish my parents had moved to Livermore when I started begging them to in 2006. With so many freeway overpasses collapsed, how can I be certain that I could get under 580 on Grove or, for that matter, under 580 on Five Canyons Parkway? When I can get online, Google Maps shows everything the way it was before the quake; it's deceptively promising. My parents' house looks just fine and I almost convince myself that I could make it and find them and rescue them.

12:10 pm

Veronica thinks I am abandoning my family, and thinks I left the note on the tree myself. It's my handwriting, after all. Which I hadn't noticed. Now I know what her silence means. She thinks I'm unhinged. 

Am I?

After all, I told her I thought I saw myself outside last night. 

I can tell she even thinks that the doppelEdward from the railroad tracks is me, that I was using theatrical disguise for some purpose I won't share with her.
Why would I do that?, I ask. She does not reply. But she is packing.

V proposes the following: can we at least check on my parents, and on the Oakland contingent of the family, and on her sisters, before leaving? Tears in her eyes. I counter that there's a chance that my family are all already at the cabin.  Let me call the cabin and check. She says no, we can't spend the money to refill the minutes on the phones. Again I propose that we go get our money out of the credit union and take it with us. Again she refuses. I ask what happens when the Credit Union is underwater. She pours herself a shot of the single-malt Scotch I'd been saving for when that paycheck comes. I offer the suggestion that we also stop by her Dad's in Tracy and check on him as we go, even though it will take us wildly off-course from the instructions I've been given. She looks at me, and the tears flow, and she half-whispers, "I forgot about my Dad," and I hold her for a very long time.

In the end, I have agreed. We will go to Hayward first, if it makes her happy.

I feel only dread and doom.