CELEBRATE! : Orange County’s First 100 Years : A VISION OF THE FUTURE : SEARCH FOR SANCTUARY

April 12, 2004. All of us old enough to remember the morning of the Great Shake have a shared, communal insomnia. Never really resting easy, knowing that from that day on our lives literally rest on shifting sands. Sixteen years have passed and, still, sheer exhaustion is about all that can put me under, into a state of involuntary slumber.

Indian summer, 2020. I’d spent the afternoon hiking up to my favorite campsite in the Saddle-back Preserve. The Reconstruction Corps, in its frigid mercy, had finally given me a weekend off, and I intended to spend the time under an open sky. Back in the last century, campers used to come from all over the county to smell the orange blossoms and lose themselves in the view of the Promised Land, the stuff of panoramic postcards--from the foothills to the Pacific. Then the brown soup started closing in.

Well, now you could see Catalina most every day, and we had a different type of bumper crop--the kind that grew on local communes, not on freeways. History may never repeat itself, exactly, but it tends to have the last laugh.

I wriggled into my sleeping bag with the first evening chill, the thermals set extra warm. Lying on the ground, both the earth and I seemed at peace, or at least in a state of armistice. I made the mistake of dropping my guard and, having done so, closed my eyes just for a minute . . . .

Something snapped me awake. What, I wasn’t sure. 2:32, my chrono said. Stars profuse and unblinking overhead, no breeze in the nearby chaparral, not so much as a cricket stirring. I didn’t like the quiet, not this kind. I knew it too well.

The ground started trembling in the absolute silence. Nothing drastic, a mild jittering. Then a deeper lurch, as if all of creation was on a particularly bumpy flight.

I scrambled for the one piece of electronics I’m never without. First I took a laser reading of the horizon, then a fix due north. Nothing else I could do besides wait and count the duration. One thousand nine . . . 10 . . . Jeez, a real grabber . . . finally fading away on the count of 18.

The readout winked CALCULATING , then RICHTER 4.25 . A low-to-medium shaker, the epicenter displaying on-screen now. About 6 kilometers offshore, near Corona del Mar. Probably new pressure on the Newport-Inglewood Fault now that we had Hydrofracturing Plant No. 2 in full operation, slowing the drift of the San Andreas. The tremor was most definitely not on the forecast, and little shocks could often be the worst.

As if anybody needed reminding.

I sat very still and watched the entire Metrobasin light up, from the foothills to the county line and beyond. The Enclaves glowed first and brightest, of course, but there were even furtive pinpoints in the Abandoned Areas. Five million households checking the power and the foundation-probes, praying that their feet weren’t made of clay, that their little wigwam would survive until morning.

Most of the lights, once on, stayed that way the rest of the night. All those poor bastards just like me, hoping the Next One could be kept at bay, if only we gave up dreaming.

By sunrise, I was already hefting my backpack, the gyros set on auto, trekking out of the foothills toward the nearest TransitGrid station. I’d left my hoovie in my garage, back when I had delusions of being on vacation.

But, no doubt, Dispatch would be buzzing presently; they’d be needing help with those frantic 711 calls that follow any slippage: “Come check the mercury bearings under the Marriott.” Or, “Please bring an exorcist; my swimming pool is possessed.” What I wasn’t prepared for was Manny Fuentes beeping me direct on my portable.

“Tom? How’s your beauty sleep?” He laughed, unoffended by my reply. “Don’t complain. I jumped out of bed when this one hit and nearly broke a toe. Anyway, we’ve got a call. I’ll explain on the way.”

We arranged for a rendezvous at the corner of Chapman and Tustin avenues. Manny turned heads as always, pulling up in his screaming red Ford bimode, a ’17 coupe with the vintage rocket-ship lines. He kept the wheels in place until we got to the freeway, then rose up on the Ford’s air-cushion down-draft. It seemed strange seeing traffic again after all these years. The passable Caltrans routes were actually getting some use now that the hoovie plants in Detroit, Seoul and Volgograd were finally catching up with demand.

“Headquarters got a tip.” Manny kept his eyes on the fissures that still ran like petrified lightning through the concrete, not trusting the autopilot. “A Viet woman in Pagoda Gardens. Her name’s Mai Diem, legal since ‘09, the first in her family. She’s involved with Sanctuary. The word is, she’s approachable.

I groaned inwardly. The charter of the Reconstruction Corps says nothing about pursuing or courting para-illegals. Our board of directors, and especially our bankrollers on the other side of the Pacific, prefer to set themselves above the untidiness of U.S. policy and American public opinion.

Mr. Middle Class is of two minds on the issue, as he always has been. The supposedly unskilled foreign tide must, of course, be stopped. But until that day comes, how nice it is to pick and choose your maids and au pairs and stoop laborers from a pool of such desperately eager applicants. Meanwhile, the INS, the civvy police, even the Pinkertons, are the executors of schizoid political will, searching out those at-limbo souls who don’t get hired, who have expired scan-cards or no cards at all.

But beyond this mix of guilt and expediency, the corps had its own responsibility to straighten out the para-illegal mess. We brought many of them here in the first place, back when we needed all the hands we could find to help clear away the rubble.

Now, with the La Habra Abandoned Area finally being reclaimed, thousands of the not-quite-wanted would be forced out of hiding. They had to live somewhere, but on which side of whose border? The corps had an obligation to place them here, in the housing so many of them helped to build, and to fight for their legal status.

But for us to do that, they first had to be found, and the Sanctuary leaders were suspicious of us. Unfortunately, mercenaries followed in our footsteps, looking to bag their quota of INS bounty. They often operated with corps “credentials” forged convincingly enough to fool the unwary. Thus the sad and cautionary folklore about the poor Guatemalan or South African or Taiwanese who trusted the wrong person and found himself in handcuffs on the first deportation jet heading “home.”

Advisory signs ahead blinked crimson, announcing another closure. This morning’s quake had probably undermined the latest repairs. Manny sighed philosophically and guided us on the Main Street off ramp. He kept the pads engaged, so we didn’t have to worry about which alternate routes were still closed to wheeled traffic.

Santa Ana is my favorite part of the county, maybe because the best of it seems lost in another time: high-gabled houses serene in their dotage, snoozing under eucalyptus and pepper trees; little madre y padre shops selling zapatos and roast carnitas and discos lamenting a tenor’s lost love; remnants of an era when cattle grazed within city limits.

Thanks to geological caprice, they and the cows and, yes, the orange groves have all survived, while most of the big steel-and-glass tower blocks had to be razed, replaced “temporarily” by geodesics and flex-tents--architecture by Barnum & Bailey.

We skirted the edge of the Civic Center, past blocks that looked like Berlin in 1945, finally turning up Broadway and its thriving restaurant row. Barrio cantinas, kimchi franchises, falafel emporiums, even surf-and-soya hangouts --all intermingled profitably. I was suddenly hungry, but we cruised on by, past increasingly dubious establishments where today’s fajitas probably spent last night yowling on a picket fence.

Prosperity remained a patchwork quilt, even after all these years, covering some zones, leaving others in the cold. And yet, not unexpectedly, we encountered less blight and more fresh paint and flower boxes as we angled closer to the boundaries of Disney territory.

A long line of sky-rises beckoned on the other side of Garden Grove Boulevard. They looked enchanted from a distance, an Emerald City set between the Viet ‘Plexes and the perimeter of the Magic Kingdom Estates. And I appreciated their engineering under-the-skin--the first application of flex-tent technology to multistory design.

But, close up, Pagoda Gardens was mostly a worsening eyesore--giant Plasticine phalluses with cracked cladding, duct-tape windows, laundry fluttering off balconies.

Our corps ID got us through the scanner in the sub-lobby. Up 67 floors, then along a musty corridor, Shinto rock blasting behind one door, infant squalls behind another. I’d heard stories about how the Gardens were riddled with haven-houses, drug houses, houses for purposes not covered by any lease. So when we buzzed Apartment 6722, I was hardly surprised by the longish wait, full of private stirrings within.

“Yes?” The voice on-speaker sounded casual, noncommittal, yet ready for an armed assault. We pressed our fingerprints into the outside sensor. No forgery here. Fuentes and Rappaport, the team that just might be worthy of trust.

She opened up without any coy preliminaries. She looked about 20 judging from appearances, which, of course, was not the most reliable guide. You never know these days who can afford a good rejuv-technician. But she didn’t seem cosmetically inclined. She would have been quite lovely if not for the embittered stare that rendered her street-wise in all the regrettable ways.

“Miss Diem?” I asked.

“Don’t stand there. Shut the door, quick. The little ones run outside with audiospikes. They’ve turned whole families over to the mercenaries for small change.”

The apartment was neat to the point of minimalism. Its occupant moved at a studied pace, seemingly ignoring us, folding the bamboo screen that partitioned off the kitchenette, depolarizing the windows, setting a teakettle on an actual gas-burning stove. In the living room, a miniature Jesus hung from a crucifix, sharing wall space with a Georgia O’Keeffe lily and an array of personal photos. Black and white 8x10s of a wizened Vietnamese gentlemen grinning gaptoothed behind a cake. A considerably younger Mai Diem, arm-in-arm with . . . a kid brother? I couldn’t be sure. I only knew that the girl in the picture was buoyed, lightened by his presence.

“Never mind all that, Mr. Rappaport. You couldn’t possibly be interested.” She called for the glass door to open, then carried a tea service on a tray out onto her balcony. “Come with me, both of you. I do this every morning.”

Her enclosure was hardly wider than a ledge. A pigeon fluttered by, then flapped-flapped way down below. A wrought-iron railing, none too high, seemed to be all that was keeping us from joining him.

“Don’t worry.” Mai set the tray down on a table the size of a milking stool. “You both should have been here earlier. We stopped swaying a couple of hours ago.” She laughed, mostly to herself, but even an unshared smile proved becoming. “You’ll be all right. Look straight out, not down.” She had a point. It was, of course, one of the world’s most famous and controversial views. The county’s older residents, especially, have never been able to reconcile themselves to the complete transplantation of their community’s heart.

I had just turned 17 when the Southern California I knew underwent its 94-second urban renewal. Much of the terror and bereavement I’ve mercifully forgotten, but one memory will not leave me. Waiting for boiled water in a National Guard tent, taking rather pathetic hope in their emergency viddicast. Lo! Amid the flattened landscape, the Matterhorn was still standing.

My younger self saw it as an omen. More important, so did the mountain’s owners. At last, a chance to fulfill Walt’s original dream of an Experimental Community, not way off in the swamplands of Florida but right here, where we were all so desperately in need of fantasy.

So the Company bought and bulldozed vast tracts of Anaheim, Buena Clinton and Garden Grove that neighbored the original Disney park. The old Magic Kingdom became both the hub and the inspiration for the new offspring surrounding it. Three hundred acres of the AmeriCore, a land of popular, if expensive, public amusement.

Beyond that, a different kind of playground, very definitely private, 10,000 acres and still growing. How much would it take, what sort of Credit Level enabled a move into the Magic Kingdom Estates? More than I would ever see, but some people had it. A different species to my mind, folks who wanted to reside in a Swiss Family tree house, a 20-room frontier cabin, pink castles with battlements and drawbridges.

Company brochures never used the word enclave . But their creation had undoubtedly become the prototype--here and across the country. The patrolled earthen berm with its stun-fences, the manicured greenery set in a landscape terraformed as if for miniature golf, a preoccupation with whimsy and security and social hygiene. You could spend your entire life there, like those Hong Kong junk people who from birth until death never set foot on solid ground.

“Sometimes I watch for hours.” Mai reached under her chair for a pair of day/night binoculars. “That boy, way down there? No, further up, where the monorail crosses the moat. He goes every morning to jet-ski in the Main Lagoon. My brother worked on the original excavation. He wore those silly mouse ears at home, everywhere. They paid him so well, he thought he’d never have to leave. He never came completely to his senses. He moved here.”

She waved dismissively at the adjacent tower blocks. “This was as close as he could get. The Gardens are always in a zoning war, you know, always in the courts. Disney doesn’t approve of the Pagodas spoiling their horizons. Or of us peering in for free.”

“Your brother’s entitled, I guess.”

“He’s dead.” Mai did not elaborate. She deliberated over the pouring of the tea into thimble cups, passing one to Manny and one to me. “But that’s not why you’re here, is it? You’re full of nothing but good intentions, I suppose. No doubt you want to make friends with Sanctuary again. New land for you to clear. La Habra will have those little real estate signs planted everywhere. She waited out my explanations, seeming not to hear them. “Shall I tell you why I joined? Sanctuary, I mean.” The tea was still hot and the cups had no handles. “I can explain, a little.

“Para-illegals are kind of like an extended family. They need you so desperately. They give you much joy and an endless supply of grief.” Her eyes glinted, looking inside toward her enshrined photos on the wall. “You might say I have ideal qualifications for the job.”

DR, COLOR, ALAN HASHIMOTO