Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [1]
When Ralph Mills bought the old Frank Morrot residence catty-corner to the Ibañez Grocería, he planned to turn it into a nice, low-budget motel for the fishermen who came to Lake Rito, six miles away. Guests who checked in never checked out, and Ralph found himself the reluctant landlord to an assortment of cranky old pensioners. Death alone generated vacancies.
William Fitzgerald IV had acquired over 400 acres of Morrot groves by the 1960s. He sent his son, John, to study agronomy at Cal Poly, San Jose. His daughter, Billie, went to Stanford, where, he hoped, she’d use her commendable intellect to attract a suitable husband. John now practices entertainment law in West Hollywood. Billie came home from Stanford in her junior year five months pregnant. No husband. She presently manages some 500 acres of avocados, oranges, grapefruit, lemons, tangelos, mandarins, and pomelos.
Yolanda Marina Torres, the novice Sister Katy at the Purísima Sacred Heart Academy near Lompoc, was accompanying a group of other teacher-nuns to a seminar on audiovisual aids in Los Angeles. They stopped at a fruit stand on the Santa Bernita Highway and a man named Luis Salazar asked Yolanda if he could see her hair. She never made it to the seminar. She’s now the mom in their mom-and-pop bar and grill, Happy Yolanda’s, in downtown Rito.
Libby and Stockton Daw, a young couple from New Orleans, bought a ten-acre parcel four miles from town for an extravagant sum of money. They bulldozed a site for an enormous, postmodern home that Stockton, an award-winning architect, was designing. Within a year, Stockton was living with a TV actress in Burbank and Libby was alone on the property, inhabiting an older-model Manatee house trailer and working two jobs to make ends meet.
The most popular explanation for the valley’s haywire history and unpredictable future is geological. The valley is slung between two ridges in the Santa Bernita Mountains, which, contrary to almost every other American range, run east and west. The Santa Bernitas are young mountains, surging in place, their stratigraphy diagonal, their profiles jagged and fanciful, as if cut with a jigsaw in the hands of a child. Erosion and vegetation haven’t worn them down or softened the evidence of continual upheaval. Gravity itself has never fully asserted its steadying centripetal power. Pivoting outward from the San Andreas Fault, the region still twitches with frequent, tiny earthquakes. And there’s a grade by Harry Zeno’s junkyard where cars, if left in neutral at a complete standstill, will roll uphill at speeds up to twenty MPH. Nearby irrigation ditches also run uphill. So it stands to reason that humans, being ninety percent water, should also fall prey to certain reversals and unpredictabilities.
Red Ray attributed the relative success of his drunk farm to the valley’s peculiar seismology. Drunks, Red had long since learned, were the world’s most assiduous planners. They planned their next drinks, to drink only socially, to stop drinking entirely. They planned to make their first million, to improve their marriages, to live new, perfect lives. Out in the world at large, such plans had predictable outcomes. But here, in the Santa Bernita Valley, where nobody could predict anything with accuracy, even drunks had a fighting chance to surprise themselves.
Although long-term valley inhabitants have learned to tailor their expectations, everybody still makes plans, the more elaborate, the better, if only to take greater delight in the permutations to come. It’s a great place to live, they say, if you like surprises: it’s just like life, only different.
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