Orange you glad we came home
- Jun 8
- 10 min read
“Sounds like we were in the right place at the wrong time,” I said. “See? Luck isn’t about avoiding danger. It’s about how good it feels when it doesn’t get you.”
“With all the forests in California closed for fire season, we’ll have to get better acquainted with familiar places instead,” Mom said the next morning as she dug through drawers for her running clothes. “And maybe meet some people here, too.”
“I’ve sniffed every inch of this town,” I humble-bragged. “I know everything there is to know about everyone who’s ever peed here.”
“Maybe you should get to know the people themselves, not just the distractions they leave behind.” Mom checked the key bowl by the door to see if she’d remembered to leave the car keys there for once. As usual, the Wagon keys were there, but not the keys to the around-town car. “I’m always in such a hurry to get stuff done so we can hit the road that I hardly know anyone here in town.” She started digging through the laundry, shaking shorts and jackets and listening for the jingle of keys.
“I bet Rick and Diane have missed me terribly.” I ran to the door before she could change her mind. “Let’s go find them right now.”
“There’s this trail on the far end of town that I’ve been meaning to check out.” She pulled the car keys from the pocket of shorts she’d worn so long ago that I hardly remembered them. “I was thinking we should go there this morning?”
“You mean there are districts of My Hometown that I’ve never visited and you didn’t tell me?”
“It’s paved. I thought you wouldn’t be interested.” She shrugged. “It’s down in the headlands by that old World War 2 lookout. You know, the one that sits like 10 feet in the air because the ground eroded around its foundation?”
“You mean Rapunzel’s tower.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s an old war thing, but let’s go check it out to see who’s right,” Mom challenged, turning our disagreement into a game.
Walking to the car, I picked up on something fishy. Wasn’t it suspicious that the air didn’t smell fishy at all? I held up my nose and sniffed for a clue, but the stink of campfires drowned out everything. Instead of little spittles of ocean breath settling on the car overnight, it was dusty with grey flakes that didn’t drip, but fell like feathers when Mom opened the door.
It’s normal for it to be a little dreary in the morning, when the ocean fogs up the air in its eagerness to meet the day. It’s not normal for the morning to never come at all. The air glowed the color that a fire shines on a wall, and although the morning was getting on, the streetlights never turned off. As we drove across My Hometown, my eyes strained to see beyond what was right next to the road. Familiar rocks, bushes, and sidewalks appeared under the streetlights, but anything behind their cones of light looked like the smudges an eraser leaves behind. The ocean was nowhere to be seen.
“Isn’t it usually lighter at this time of morning?” I asked.
“I know it’s early, but this is wild.” Mom squinted at the flat nothingness ahead, where the road faded away. “It’s like a scene out of Cormac McCarthy. And why is it orange?”
So that’s what orange meant! It was one of those human words I heard all the time but never understood. I sniffed a big noseful of the foul, revolting, monstrous air and thought about orange so I would remember for the next time. When I had it memorized, I asked, “What’s a Big Mac McCarthy?”
“There’s this story. It’s about a boy and a man. Some world-ending catastrophe happens before the story starts—I don’t know what, the book is kind of vague on the details—but there are fires, the sun and plants disappear, and everything is covered in ash. There’s also disease, so most of the people are dead. Everyone who’s left is afraid, desperate, and violent.”
I relaxed a bit. “So all this has happened before. How does it end?”
Mom didn’t answer the question so she could tell the story like it belonged to her. “It’s about a father and son’s love for each other. They walk along the road all the way to the ocean. There’s some sense that the ocean will bring safety, but that part isn’t really explained.”
“That sounds just like us!” I looked toward where the ocean should be, glad that we were already almost at the happy ending.
Mom continued her book report. “I think the moral is supposed to be that love is the only thing that can save us in a post-apocalyptic world. But, like, not in a mushy way.”
“What’s a pup-eclip-trick?” The word confused my tongue. “Is it a word for the healing power of dogs?”
“Apocalypse means the End of the World as we know it.”
“Look! I can almost see the pup-eclipse from here.” There was just enough light now to make out the waves beating themselves against the sand behind the Wooden Taco Bell. The water was the dark, oily grey of heavy metal in the rusty air. “You know the End of the World, Mom. We run by it all the time.”
“No one calls the coast the End of the World but you. I meant it in the sense of the sudden collapse of civilization after a disaster. Or, that’s what it means in literature, anyway. I’d never seen an apocalypse in real life before, but this year’s been more like something out of a book than anything I’ve ever experienced.”
Now that she mentioned it, it did feel like the whole world had been fighting for breath ever since I left my old office for the last time. Even though I’d never seen the air turn orange before, I recognized the burnt sienna oppressiveness like you do something that you’ve only seen out of the corner of your eye as it stalks you from the shadows. Until now, we’d escaped, but its stranglehold had tightened with each twist of the plot until now it was here in My Hometown to suffercate us once and for all.
First, we’d tried fleeing civilization, back when it was just the boogeyvirus—an invisible curse that choked its victims from the inside out. The fresh air protected us for a while. When the curse caught up and sent us home, we were safe as long as we stayed in the Stuck House. But being stuck is its own kind of suffercation. To break free, people had to hide behind stifling muzzles that muffled their words, hid their faces, and smothered their spirit. If you could believe the loudest ones, the muzzles smothered their breath, too. When one of its faceless vigilantes came to muzzle Mom, she didn’t fight, but turned and ran away. And again, when anger, hurt, and traffic choked the Grey Bridge with cars that overflowed with people screaming from sunrooftops that they couldn’t breathe, we choked back our impatience to make room for the grief of others who needed it more. It was almost like there wasn’t enough air for everyone, and some had to hold their breath so that others could breathe. You never knew whose turn it was to catch their breath, but our turn never seemed to come. And then, finally, the very air went rotten with smoke. When fire filled the world and everyone else went home, Mom and I didn’t turn back. We alone stood up to the poisonous air, let it fill our chests, and breathed it right back out again. We nearly didn’t make it out, and now it had come for us at home to finish the job.
“Do the Boy and the Man find what they’re looking for in the ocean?” I asked, thinking of all the rivers we’d crossed, and the important lessons they’d taught us. If a little river could teach a big lesson like not fearing wet socks or waiting till the time is right, what could a whole ocean teach you?
“Not really. There might have been a giant squid, but I think I made that part up. Now that I say it out loud, it doesn’t seem consistent with the narrative style. That’s what I love about McCarthy’s storytelling, all the most significant parts are in the subtext so you fill in the gaps from your own imagination.”
“Those are the best stories! I love it when you’re looking for one thing, but you find something better than you imagined and realize that the answer was inside you all along. And how does it end?” I asked again.
“You don’t want to know.” There was a moment of silence while Mom translated what I didn’t want to know into something that I did. “But you learn that love protects us from evil, and connection to others is the path to salvation.”
I was about to ask her if she’d even finished the book, but the car pulled off the familiar road into an unfamiliar car kennel, and I had more important things to wonder about. I climbed into the copilot’s chair and pressed my nose against the window, but all I smelled there was smoke.
“I’ve always wondered what was over here.” Mom opened the door and the smell of burning mixed with the faintest whiff of fish.
“No, you thought that you’ve already seen everything worth seeing,” I reminded her, because I listen to Mom’s thoughts even when she’s not listening herself.
Not all adventures pop outways. Some expeditions suck into themselves, with episodes made of details rather than landscapes. With the orange glow blotting out everything beyond sniffing distance, the world shrank down to just Mom and me. What we discovered, yard by yard, was a path tracing the End of the World mid-fall from land to sea. I sensed an imposing solidness to one side and a hollowness beyond where the rocks suddenly ended to the other.
As we ran, the smoke conjured new details that disappeared ghost-like back into the shadows after I passed. Trees with heads shaped like wind hung onto the cliff’s edge by their roottips. There were benches where a dog and his Mom could watch for giant squid, back when you could still see the ocean. The hilltops were lost in the fox-grey sky. Rock walls strained against their wire cages.
“Hey, I have been here before!” Mom said, like she’d only just discovered that we were a few miles from home. “This used to be the road before they built the tunnel. These narrow, blind curves were hell to drive on. Every so often there would be a big landslide and everyone in Half Moon Bay would be stranded for weeks.” She looked at the flimsy cage doing its best to hold back the mighty mountain. “This must be the spot that was so unstable.”
“It’s still a road,” I pointed out. Unlike the Haunted Highway, this pavement was smooth and its paint unchipped. Its steep and twisty path wasn’t a problem running at dog speed, but a clumsy car clinging to the mountainside at highway speed could make Mom’s teeth stick and the leashes in her neck pop. I checked her neck now, but it was hidden under the muzzle.
“I don’t think you need the muzzle,” I coached. “No one’s here.”
“The mask is helping, for a change. I can’t breathe this filth. Like you said, you can’t always wait for a perfect day. You’ve gotta take the bad with the good, right?”
Ahead, I could barely make out the shadow of Rapunzel’s tower as a dark spot in the murk. The prehistoric civilizations of My Hometown had a solemn tradition of watching for giant squid from Japan, so they built hovels throughout the hills, where they could watch in comfort. Helmet-shaped fortresses squatted like toadstools in the forest, hidden but for the bright hieroglyphics and sacred inscriptions painted on their walls. The difference between Rapunzel’s Tower and the ordinary fortresses was that Rapunzel’s Tower was perched on top of a sandy trunk narrower than its floor. It sat like a lighthouse in a flat, open area right at the edge of the cliff, drawing the eyeballs of any dog, tourist, or bird who passed by.
I’d seen Rapunzel’s Tower from the road many times, but never up close. Despite the dream-like VHS-feeling of the morning, the tower seemed more real from outside the car than it did zooming past the window like a movie background. When we were under the shade of its floor, we stopped running to inspect the inscriptions. A Mom-sized painter wouldn’t be able to climb that high. Only a giant could have painted the messages on its walls.
“What do the hieroglyphs say?” I asked.
“Most of the ones I can read are about smoking weed.”
“This might be important,” I said. Maybe the world catching on fire was just the beginning, and these ancient inscriptions held clues about what was to come after the Great Smoking. “Do you think all the plants burn, or just the weeds? Are there any instructions on how to stop it?”
“Nah, it’s just drunk kids. Or, I guess they were high.”
“They must have been, to reach all the way up there.”
“It wasn’t always like this. It used to be on the ground 75 years ago, but the wind wore away the sand underneath over time. It’s basically a hoodoo.”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out: who do that? And how did they make it float?”
“Its base won’t hold up much longer. It’ll fall into the ocean one of these days.”
“I knew the world was falling apart!” I looked at the tower for a long moment, waiting for Rapunzel to unfurl her fur, invite us inside, and settle the bet. But no hair-stair came. Maybe Rapunzel had given up waiting for visitors, too. After half a year of being locked up with Mom in a tower of sorts, I could understand how she might start to believe that no visitors would ever come.
Now that we were living in a world without sun, where the street lights never turned off, would there ever be an end to the troubles? Maybe this really was the End of the World. I wished that Mom had finished that Big Mac McCarthy book so she could tell me how the story made it from here to a happy ending.
Mom turned away from the tower and looked into the bushes on the other side of the highway. “It looks like the trail keeps going over there.” Her eyes pointed through the mist to a gate among the bushes. “Wanna see where it goes?”
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
