Two Gates

 

The Manila Dunes are divided into two distinct sections. One, the southern section, passes briefly through a dune forest before emerging onto piles of humpbacked dunelands strewn with succulents, ropy flowering vines and clusters of other plants that grow over the sand like a net rather than through it. Walking in this section, eventually you’ll climb a slight rise and then the surf will be crashing into the densely packed sand no more then 50 feet in front of you, redwood logs lolling in tide, bladderwrack dripping with fog. The dunes are such an excellent sound-barrier, even the roaring of the winter Pacific can barely be heard through one of them.

The other, northern, section, is only open on the weekends. The access road to reach it is seven tenths of a mile long and it’s pitted with holes which, even in dry weather, collect morning fog and are lined with mud. In wet whether (which is the norm) each of these potholes is like a tarnished mirror reflecting the pine and cedar boughs that crowd the path on either side. From the parking area at the end of this road, the Mad River slough can be accessed. Before I moved to northern California, I’d never heard of a slough. Sometimes, I still read the word as ‘slow’ rather than ‘slew’, as it’s pronounced here. At high tide, the slough is a river; in low tide, it’s a trough of mud with a few drainage ditches snaking through it, egrets and herons poking around, godwits running in the mud. The trail here is beautiful following this river of mud along a narrow line that skirts a coniferous forest and a towering dune that’s pouring into the forest like something loosed from an enormous broken hourglass: a clean, solid background for the flaky, needled chaos of the swampgrowth at its base. Further down the trail, the shrubs and swampy undergrowth cluster and rise over the path creating a tunnel through which to walk, even in the bright afternoon, surrounded by a sort of littoral gloom.

This, perhaps because it is such an outrageous landscape, is the only place my two year-old daughter will walk at a persistent clip. Anywhere else, the forest, the beach, the marsh, she will take a tenth of a step and bend over to examine the minutiae at her feet or within arm’s reach, overhead and anywhere else she can find minutiae. I can’t bring myself to interrupt her explorations—it makes me feel like I’m pushing some kind of adult agenda on her—so I just stand there, unable to appreciate the pebble she’s rolling between her fingers for the five minutes she’s spent savoring the thing, and likewise unable to find the value in returning to the same broken tree to declare—in increasingly shrill tones—Broke! Broke! To which I invariably reply “Yes. It’s broken,” like I’m already starting to correct her grammar—God forgive me.

So, on Sunday, we went out to the northern section of the dunes to take an actual walk. I had some work to finish up as my students were writing their final essay which was due that night and the inevitable what-are-we-supposed-to-be-doings were swelling my inbox. After daylight savings, it’s been getting dark well before 6, but, as it was only a little after four when I finished up, I figured we had plenty of time for a little walk.

We arrived at dunes and bounced down the long, pitted drive to the northern parking area to access the path along the slough. There were a few other cars in the parking lot, but it’s not a crowded area. We only saw two other people on the path that only has a few spurs out to the ocean and is mostly a loop along the slough.

I don’t know if it was the gloaming or just that we’d been the week before, but my daughter wasn’t as interested as she’d been in the past. She was still walking, but she’d mixed in a bit of her dawdling and asking to be carried, only to ask to be put down. We were making progress, but it was a steadily halting progress. The gloaming gathered around us and streamed from the swampy thickets, becoming a syrupy darkness, like something squeezed from the humid mushrooms that lined the path in places where trees had fallen and rotted. The lighter color of the sandy soil in contrast to the dark underbrush made the path just luminous enough to see and made the darkness feel like something grasping. There was no moon, but it was becoming a clear night and there was a touch of sunset smoldering under the western horizon.

We were a little more than halfway along our loop when Gina said something about maybe hurrying, maybe being locked in. It wasn’t something that had even occurred to me, but even with the mention and the swelling darkness, it seemed too early to worry about. We hadn’t been gone very long and when we’d left there’d been three other cars in the parking lot. Surely those people were all out here coaxing their two year-olds to a normal walking pace as well, but, when we arrived in the parking lot, we found it not crepuscular, but dark. All the other cars were gone. I’m the type of person that waits until the last minute to hurry and, as this was clearly the last minute, I dove into the car and started it up, hurrying Gina through getting my daughter into her car sear like it’d been my idea all along to hurry.

Let me be clear. As we splashed down that rutted road, the headlights scudding along the dirt and gravel, barely rising through the fog to eye-level, I didn’t really think there would be a problem. I jokingly said something to Gina about the suspense of the moment, but I felt sure we’d be fine. Maybe we’d cut it close, but I knew that no one was going to be that vigilant about locking a gate in the middle of nowhere but as I was thinking this, it hove into view, at first just cuts in the fog, like someone had been slashing a cutlass at it, but then slashes took on a strange geometric design, something like a long isosceles triangle barring the road: the gate was closed.

Even understanding that the gate was closed, and being faced with it, I didn’t feel worried. It could probably be opened, I thought and my mind wasn’t even scrambling, it was just ambling along a neat row of possibilities. I got out and checked the gate; it had three heavy padlocks dangling from a manacle of interlocked iron pieces. It was heavy and formidable to even lift the locking apparatus. Even if one of the locks could be forced, there were two others. I wondered vaguely who would go to the trouble of so severely locking a place that one could easily walk to if one wished. There was about three feet open on either side of the gate. Was it really that big of a deal to keep cars out or, in our case, in? I looked at those locks and then back and my wife and daughter looking up expectantly from the glow of the car’s interior lights. It was completely dark now and we’d have to call for help.

I took out my phone and, noticing I only had 8% battery, called 911. I knew it wasn’t an emergency, but I had no idea who else to call. After I explained my non-emergency to the operator, I was quick to mention the two-year-old with us, hoping to give the non-emergency a little more priority. I was given the Humboldt County Sheriff’s number. The battery was down to 6%. I called the Sheriff and explained to the voice on the other end and to the dark around me: the locked gate, the two-year-old who didn’t have a spare diaper the long walk from here to anywhere, that was dinner time about an hour ago.

“I’m sorry,” the sympathetic voice said. “We don’t have that key and I have absolutely no idea who would.”

By the way she’d stressed absolutely, I decided to cut my losses and call Gina’s folks. I hadn’t even hung up when the screen went dark. The phone had died. Damn things always die when they still read 4% battery.

I think we all have doubts about our parenting ability, but standing there suddenly holding a dead phone, looking at my daughter through the darkness, knowing I’d driven us way out into this remote swamp and when it started to get dark, I’d ignored the warnings from my wife that maybe we should try to hurry, I knew it was my fault. We were absolutely stuck and I’d been the one to ensure it. I stood there, uncertain how to even begin to address the situation. Luckily, my wife is resilient and has a lousy understanding of spatial relationships.

“Wait a minute,” she said getting out of the car after I’d told her my phone had died—naturally she hadn’t brought hers. “This bank is all sand,”she said pointing to the right of the gate. “Maybe we could dig our way out. The car’s small enough.”

“Maybe.” I said. Looking at our shoebox of a car. Luckily, I’ve got an even worse sense of distance and measurement than she does and it seemed herculean but possible to actually dig a road out of the sand to the right of the gate. We got a tire iron and a wrench out of the trunk and began to madly claw at the sand and plants. It was a ridiculous hope, but one that, if pulled off, would be immensely gratifying. I could see it, we’d clear out the sand and leave the gate-locking bastard scratching his head when he came back in the morning and found a lane open at the side of the gate. Maybe I’d even leave a note about the futility of putting gates in sandy places. That would show ‘em.

Our daughter was occupied with a bag of Kix while we hacked and tore at the bank, breaking through roots and pushing heaps of sandy loam between our straddling legs, like dogs at the beach. It seemed to be working, gradually we were breaking the bank down, first by inches than by feet. I was going nuts with that tire iron just hacking at the sand and the roots underneath, trying to make up for my other, myriad inadequacies. There were only two issues. We’d need an excavator to get rid of all the sand; it would be tough to drive over it and the gate had this terrible guideline projecting into the bank which was also iron and thick enough to gash a hole in the roof or break the windshield. Even if we dug a two-lane road out of the sand, this guideline, I was beginning to see, would still be too low to get around. I thought we could maybe dig it out, but the longer we spent digging, I began to realize that it wasn’t looking good. Even if we cleared it all away, that guideline couldn’t be moved and the car would be on a serious angle.

Still, we decided to take a look. Gina got in and drove right up to the opening we’d made. No good. No good at all. But, seeing no alternative, I couldn’t give up. I dug frantically for another 10 minutes, tearing and pushing heaps of dirt, but when Gina moved the car back, the situation was the same.

Luckily we had the stroller in the trunk. I took it out. We got our daughter out—she was surprisingly calm as little kids tend to be in those situations—and I got in and drove the car back to the parking lot so it wouldn’t be blocking the road, then, I ran back carrying more Kix and another toy that had been in the car. Gina had explained to our daughter what was happening and she repeated “gate” and “stuck” like a mantra occasionally asking “key?” like a refrain in a song about our situation. It was great. Two-year-olds are great for adding levity.   

The three of us, made our way down the rest of the road in darkness. We’d gone quite a way before Gina asked me what my plan was. Funny, I hadn’t really even been thinking of one. I’d gone into some kind of autopilot, perhaps planning on walking all the way home—as I would’ve done had I been alone, but it wasn’t an option.

“I guess we’ll try to flag down a car and ask to use their phone. There’s no way I’m going up to one of these houses around here.” The houses around the Manila dunes are notoriously ramshackle, swarming with barking dogs and cars rusting back into the sand that’s grown up over their flattened tires. The kind of yards that belong to people who shoot when they see someone picking their way up to their door in the dark. I wasn’t even so sure we could avoid being shot by these people even if we didn’t go anywhere near their homes.

We were nearly back to the first parking area, the one they don’t lock, when we encountered it, and even in the wisps of fog and strands of murky residual light, it was funny. Even if we’d managed to dig ourselves out of the gate, we wouldn’t have gone more than half a mile, before we would’ve hit this one, a second gate, which was even more formidable than the one before it with trees on either side. I started to imagine how awful it would’ve been to dig ourselves out from around that first gate, only to bang up against this one. It made me feel better that I hadn’t done anything too stupid to get out from behind the first one—that is anything other than spending half an hour frantically digging into an embankment. I imagined someone seeing it in the morning and having a pretty good laugh.

At this point my daughter’s mantra changed to “two gates, stuck, key?” When she said ‘key’ she shook her head.  

When we’d made our way around this second gate, a car pulled down the narrow road going in the other direction. We called after it and raised our arms. It continued around a corner, but I knew the parking lot to the beach was just around the corner, so we walked quickly, hoping to stop who ever was going to the beach in the dark to ask to use their phone.

We didn’t even have to go all the way to the beach. The car had stopped in front of one of moldering houses sinking into the sand, surrounded by rusted cars and collapsing fences obscuring barking dogs. Someone was standing by the car. Just standing there in the dark. I explained the situation to what could’ve been a cardboard cutout or even just a shadow. Gina took up the explanation and I thought it better to let her finish,  in fact to let her and our daughter take as much of the spotlight as possible so as to downplay that reality that one man had stepped from an empty darkness to address another who’d been standing, also alone, in this darkness.

The dark form, without saying much, offered a phone. Gina called her folks. We thanked the guy for the phone and went to wait by the entrance to the area just off the highway. Within a few minutes, the guy who’d let us use his phone came driving back out from the house we’d met him in front of. He slowed, leaned out the window and asked if we’d needed to use the phone again before driving away. When I’d called the Sheriff’s Department and told them I was in the middle of nowhere with a dying phone, no food or water—well, except the Kix—and with a toddler, I’d thought maybe they’d send someone just to make sure we were alright, but in the end, it was the kindness of someone who was either buying or selling drugs that provided the help we needed. The entire time we were out there, we didn’t see another car until Gina’s dad drove up to get us.

Luckily, Gina’s folks aren’t the judgmental type. Her dad was genuinely glad to help. As we got into the car, we realized we’d forgotten the car seat and I set off, all the way down the dark, gated and fog-saturated gravel road to get it. The car’s headlights swum out ahead of me at first, but then faded and dropped back until, turning around, they were distant enough to resemble stars in the sky. By the time I’d reached the car and gotten the car seat out, I couldn’t even see them and I was convinced something was going to eat me while I humped the increasingly ungainly car seat back down the road to the car that, was waiting on the other side of that second gate.

…

In the morning, I woke up early as I usually do when something is unresolved, got on my bike and rode out to the dunes.

It was foggier than it had been at night and I couldn’t make out much in front of me once I got to the dunes, but the gates, still locked, were just as plain as they’d been the night before.

It wasn’t hard to get my bike around the gate and I rode until I came to the mess we’d made trying to get out of the second gate. Sand was strewn all over the gravel and ferns and a few other plants were tossed here and there. There was a wild crisscrossing of tire tracks where we’d made a few attempts to drive through before giving up and doing a ten-point turn to go back to the parking lot. I kicked a few of the ferns aside in an attempt to tidy up, afraid that when whoever arrived to unlock the gate, I’d be charged with some kind of destruction of property.

It was fitting that whoever had been so zealous about locking the gate the night before should be late to unlock it in the morning. We’d checked and all the signs said that the gate was locked “an hour after sun set”. The sun set around five and I’d called the Sheriff’s department at 5:52. We’d cut it a little close, but we would’ve been ok if the hours had been a little more strictly attended to. And now the gate that was supposed to open at sunrise was still locked with the sun floating an entire hand’s breadth above the horizon. I took another walk around the forest and, when I came out, it was like some magic spell had blown through the air. After focusing on these locked gates for over twelve hours, they’d come to seem immobile and, driving through them, even at that early hour, I couldn’t help but to give a little toot on the horn for all those living in various kinds of captivity; would that your gates, your bars, your cages, like mine, should one morning, be found standing inexplicably open no longer impeding the progress of the clear and rising sun.

In my imagination, I could hear my daughter’s reaction “two gates, open?” and I drove home just as the fog, that had settled in so heavily the night before, started to burn away.