Entry #7: Wellness Weekend
The tale of Two Pigeons continues. Start with Entry #1.
I’m up at Indian Springs right now in Calistoga…sitting by the pool, drinking.
Boris invited me up here. He wanted to talk about Misha but I think he mainly wanted to show off this resort he’s running now. It had been shuttered ever since the fallout days. This whole area was abandoned, and it still is, everything except this hotel and spa. A group of investors had reopened it this year as a disaster tourism destination in the middle of a radioactive zone. And sitting here by the pool…I gotta say it works.
Getting here was it’s own little adventure. A private shuttle picked guests up by the old veteran’s hospital that had been turned into a hotel years back. The van looked ridiculous…it was lifted, had giant wheels and off-road tires that were protected by metal plates, there were metal bars on all the windows, a small plow was welded to the front of the vehicle, it had a dark matte gray paint job like a stealth fighter jet. The driver told us that the windows were all bulletproof. This was part of the gimmick I guess. To give people a sense of adventure, a feeling that they were going somewhere dangerous.
We crossed Golden Gate Bridge. Up close I could see that it was starting to fall into disrepair, paint peeling, rust showing everywhere. We were the only vehicle on it. No one came up here anymore…no one other than researchers and military patrols. We took the 101 through San Rafael and then the 29 up to Calistoga through Napa and St. Helena. This was the heart of what used to be wine country…full of farm-to-table restaurants, antique shops, wine tasting rooms, vineyards, expensive subdivisions, farm-style country homes. Nothing left of that now. The highway was falling apart…cracks and potholes everywhere that forced the driver to slow down and go around. On both sides of the road were burned out buildings, ruined storefronts, parking lots filled with rusting cars, taken over by weeds. There were lots of animals, too. We spotted a black bear. There were deer. Ducks in the marshes by the bay. A pack of coyotes eyed us warily from an abandoned gas station as we passed. I was certain that one of them had two heads — a siamese coyote. I couldn’t take a picture but I sketched it and logged it into radWatchers anyway.
I hand’t been up here before, not since after the radiation fell. In the days after the war, the dust took an unpredictable path around the world and this whole area in the north was in its way. Napa, Sonoma, Marin, Sacramento…they were dumped on in a big way, blanketed with cesium and strontium. The whole region was glowed…was radiant in the biblical sense. When the evacuation orders finally came from the government it was already too late, the fallout had come. People fled in a panic. It was mayhem. No one wants to remember that time…but twenty thousand people died just in the crush to get out. It was mostly car accidents, people getting run over, fires breaking out.
There were five other people in the shuttle with me…a bulky man in his 40s, a youngish lesbian couple in the back behind me and a cis couple in their 50s. The big guy was talking loudly, bragging about how this is the ninth exclusion zone’s visited. “It had antlers not just on its head but running down the entire back like one of those, what do you call it, those dinosaurs,” he said, showing a photo to the guy sitting behind him. “I got this thing standing inside our living room now. My wife hates it.” He laughed. From his spiel I learned that he owned a few hundred acres of mostly worthless land out in the Mojave, not far from Nevada, which is now part of a city being built to house all the internal refugees…a self-contained urban center in the middle of the desert, like a mini-Dubai. “It was just scrub and 110 degree heat in the summer before the war. No water, no roads, no nothing. Now they call it the Oasis!” He laughed. “All thanks to my great-great-grandfather. He came out to California looking for gold and wound up as a dirt poor homesteader in the desert. He beat his kids and wife blue is the family lore. But boy oh boy did he do well by me!” He was one of those professional braggarts, clingy and annoying and compulsively repeating his life story to everyone he meets. Everyone else was in the van was quiet, hoping he’d shut up if he was ignored. But it didn’t help at all. He just kept blabbering. “Me and my wife now run a real estate outfit out there. A true goldmine. This war has been really great for us.”
A few miles later, right around Rutherford, the driver yelled into the intercom for us to buckle up. “Brace yourselves. Looks like we got some road goblin activity up ahead.” Out of the front window I could see some sort of makeshift barricade out in the distance blocking the road, smoke rising from it. The driver sped up, lowered the plow, and rammed the structure, which at a closer distance I saw was made of scraps of mental and wood and plastic and tires. The came came apart like paper on contact, debris flying in all directions around us. Several figures, gnarled and dressed in rags, scurried to the side. A thin man, shirtless, his torso smeared in dirt, shook a stick at us and yelled something. From the other side of the road someone threw a bottle that shattered against the front window. I recoiled, covering my face by reflex. But the window didn’t so much as crack. A minute later the driver slowed down and we resumed our normal pace. “It’s all fine,” he finally said over the com, breathing heavily, clearly exhilarated. “It was just some sticks and burning tires. Nothing major. These goblins aren’t in good enough shape to construct anything serious. They’re all malnourished, stomachs ulcerated, bones like chalk.” He chuckled. Everyone laughed, too.