Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [63]
The route curves right again, then crosses Buena Vista Lagoon and takes them into Oceanside.
Heads up, Boone thinks.
Teddy takes a right, turning east onto Highway 76, drives all the way through town and out into the suburbs and developments that house a lot of the marines from Camp Pendleton, then takes a left into the countryside.
Where the hell is he going? Boone wonders. Boone drops back a ways because the traffic has thinned out so much.
Then Teddy takes a right and heads inland.
What the hell? Boone thinks.
There’s not much out here now. It’s one of the few even semi-rural spaces left in metro San Diego County, out here by the old Sakagawa strawberry fields.
47
They cling to the landscape, these pieces of old farms.
They dot the local map like small, shrinking atolls in a roiling sea of real estate development.
In housing-hungry San Diego, buildings are going up everywhere. Housing developments, condo complexes, and high-rise apartment buildings are taking the place of the old fields of flowers, tomatoes, and strawberries. With the residential developments come the strip malls, the high-end shopping complexes, the Starbucks, Java Juices, and Rubio’s, the Vons, Albertsons, and Stater Bros.
Once a steady but slow tide, the building boom became a tsunami flooding the little islands of agricultural land. They’re still there, but harder to find, especially this close to the coast. Farther inland along Highway 76 are the avocado orchards of Fallbrook, then the vast orange groves among the hillsides and canyons. Farther south, in the flatlands of Carmel Valley and Rancho Peñasquitos, small fields fight a slow, losing war against development, surrounded now by new million-dollar “spec” homes built on the plateaus between the wooded canyons where the illegal workers live in camps of jerry-rigged tents and tin-roofed shacks.
Up here in Oceanside, along the banks of the San Luis River, some of the old strawberry fields stubbornly hold out. Drought, insect infestations, depression, racism, voracious development—it doesn’t matter, the farmers hang on. They could easily sell the land for far more than they make farming it, but that doesn’t matter, either.
It’s a way of life.
Not that you could find a single Japanese-American, a Nisei, actually working these strawberry fields. They’re two generations removed from that, the kids and grandkids having moved into the city and the suburbs, where they’re now doctors, lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs, and even cops.
The old man who owns these particular fields wouldn’t have had it any other way. Upward mobility was always the idea, and now a different generation of immigrants, field hands from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador work his fields, and the kids come to visit for an “afternoon in the country.”
Old man Sakagawa loves seeing his great-grandchildren. He knows that he’ll be leaving this world soon, and he knows that when he passes, this world, these fields, this way of life will pass with him. It makes him sad, but he also believes what the Buddha said, that the only constant is change.
But it does make him wistful, that the Sakagawa fields will fade like morning mist under a blazing dawn.
Now Boone follows Teddy east along North River Road, past a gas station and a food mart, then past an old church, and then …
Son of a bitch, Boone thinks.
Fucked-up, lovesick Mick Penner was right.
The motel is one of those old 1940s places with an office and a line of little cottages in the back. Someone has tried to freshen the place up—the cottages have recently been painted a bright canary yellow, with royal blue trim—one of those attempts to make it so retro that it’s hip.
Teddy pulls into the gravel parking lot and gets out. He doesn’t stop at the office but goes right toward the third cottage, like he knows just where he’s going.
“We got her,” Boone says.
“You think so?”