Fault Lines - John Knoop

wondrous and frightening how completely one’s mind and body can be possessed by the image of
another person.
Redlands, California. July 7
Miller is right. Rexroth is right. The West Coast, especially along the Pacific to the south
of Big Sur, feels like a bit of paradise. Highway 1 is visual ecstasy. You can live on the beach for
months of the year. I’m tempted to find and knock on Henry Miller’s door, but we decide to keep
going.
Mumbo jumbo of electrical problems as we try to leave L.A. The voltage regulator or the
generator brushes. Find a sandy field along the San Gabriel River and bed down. Sleeping with
one ear to the ground I hear dull thudding; it’s a lone man crossing the field at two in the
morning. At dawn raucous boys are riding their horses through the fog on the other side of the
river. A man is shoveling sand into a bucket and dumping it into the back of his station wagon.
Back in town we get the bike checked out and buy the new battery they say it needs at Milne
Bros, the BMW dealer here. Then we head south, planning to drive the hot country to the
Mexican border at night. The engine is doing fine till it blows its right piston. We limp into a gas
station on the edge of Redlands, make friends with the nice old geezer from Petoskey, Michigan
who owns it, and go to work pulling the head. We camp out in a field across the road and the next
morning I stand by the roadside with my thumb out and my notebook in my pocket so I can write
when I have a chance. I hitch back to Milne Bros. in L.A. for a new piston.
I remember hearing from my parents how eager they were to move back to Ohio at the
end of the war because they hated L.A. so much. Now I see why as I deal with the freeway culture
and the cool indifference people treat each other with. An intriguing mystery: man the blunderer,
the half crazed wanderer, man the hobbled and defeated, the contented inhabiter of suburban
corrals. Anesthetized beyond any knowledge of why his greatest happiness lies in domestication.
No yardstick to measure ease against freedom. It all looks like one long squat on the jakes of
complacency.
I’ve never been to Levittown, but I think I’m surrounded by a western version of it here.
Not where I want to live, ever. Glad the parents were such upper crust snobs about L.A. and took
us back to the farm so I could grow up running through the woods instead of around a sub-
division in Pasadena. I heard the story of how they started the goat caper many times. It went like
this: on their honeymoon, driving south from Cincinnati through Kentucky to the Smoky
Mountains, they stopped to watch a pair of Nubian goats gamboling in a pasture along the
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