From the top of the hill, the Pacific Ocean shimmers blue and undulates with the cool onshore wind pushing up the mountains. Blue and blue to the horizon with an island cast in grey on a southerly tack sitting low in the distance. The ocean is the only constant in this world. From the top of the hill homes insert into the mountain side up the street all the way to Disch anted way and to the left as a steep incline up and up as dead land lane.  A small brown stucco cottage school sits in front, mainly for children, uninhabited and locked behind an eight foot tall cyclone fence. The street runs downward, west into a cul-de-sac hidden behind a bend to the right and framing an enclosed canyon that once functioned as storm outlet running to the sea. Mellow man lane ends here and a small street begins and turns left with two houses on the ledge. The first on the corner is bluish green, large and has an expansive dichondra lawn, florid bushes, an entrance place and no one is ever seen there coming or going. A tall skinny oriental gardener whose eyes glow yellow occasionally works at the site.  On Halloween we coerce someone to come to the door for a trick or treat and no one ever comes and the house is dark and poorly lighted but kept in immaculate condition. The second house sits behind a ten foot tall red brick fence enclosing the whole compound like a fort.  A huge steel gate swings open to let cars in and out and when the Wracks walks home from school heads pop up on top of the fence and unseemly look around.  The road then turns west snakes downward  and merges into moonrise boulevard around a shrine to no-one and nothingness patrolled by priests who scare everyone away from the dream pools, meandering pathways, hidden retreats and unseen places far away from the sun shadowed by tall pines pushing upward to 50 feet. At the base of the long curve road at the ocean Moonrise boulevard stops and intersects highway 111.  A small point with a restaurant that breaks like LAN Ikea on Oahu when the swell gets to twenty feet once or twice every five years. The restaurant discharges effluent into the break and when the waves tower high dark grey shapes waft slowly in the water underneath your feet.  Time moves on and the constant are the things around us that do not talk or move and only change with the generations and the cycles of the moon.

     The street up to disc anted lane is a normal street in a beach town somewhere in the west.  The houses do not need air conditioners as the sea air keeps temperatures below 90 degrees.  In the winter, it might snow for a second, just long enough to grab some flakes and taste them and exalt in a winter season.  Houses line the street and are set into the mountain or inserted in a bed over the canyon. The house on the corner is big and brown and sits opposite Mellow man lane and the cyclone fencing of the elementary school. No one lives there very long. A prominent family on the east coast own the structure. They move in and out and the valuable corner lot is a museum of history and future occurrences.  The house next to them is a large green structure with an oriental roof and a gate in front of the entrance obscuring all that enter or exit. The Odelights sit and weed their castle constantly. They sit out in front on their knees and weed.  Afterwards they go inside. They must be the sentinels and spies.  The Odelights drive a 1950 Oldsmobile cutlass kept in immaculate and shiny condition. Time goes on. The next house on the street opposite us on the bend over the canyon looking at the pacific is a contemporary structure smaller than the Odelights with large front windows. No one stays here any longer than a couple years either.  regel got his teeth shot out playing the garbage bongos on a pleasant afternoon while trying out for an Australian rock band and then they soon moved out. The Benchly house sits opposite the Wrackers and like the other houses and families on the street, a person can not observe them arriving or leaving very often. Rumor has it that their daughter was possessed.    Everyone has electric garage door openers and flies in and out.  Her first husband had a heart attack in the middle of the night and the ambulance arrived too late. Her second husband looks like a scalded lobster and now they are separated.  I have not met Mrs. Benchly in person except to see her peeking out from her front door or the shutters on the living room window slowly move open and then close. The Barters lived across the street from us but moved to a larger house up the street where his wife died of hepatic failure. The grey house has a magnificent white water view and his sons showed me how magnesium burns and the temperature effects of an acetylene torch. They have a 500-pound drum of peroxide in their garage. On Halloween the Barters would stand on their roof and slide a weighted dummy down a rope on a pulley to frighten trick or treaters. Big brother poked little brother’s eye out. Time moves on. The Trains lived in a similar tract house to the Barters and the father was a doctor and he had two sons who would occasionally play with the Wracks.  Dr. Trains and his family soon moved to a larger house and the Gels moved in. regel would make sizzle burgers in his kitchen with worst shire sauce and plant smoke bombs in all the mail boxes.  His brother would break into the house of the Fonts and chase their young beautiful daughter.  This might be a reason regel got his teeth shot out.  His mother told me that he was a rough, mean boy and regel could not play with someone like me and my Chemistry set any more in the garage of the long house.

     The two main houses of interest are the houses next to and adjacent to the Wrackers who lived in the long yellow house. The house to the south was set on a large lot. Small complexes and independent town houses without adjoining entrances sit on the large hill corner lot.  The brown apartments are occluded with trees and brush and sit silently on the hill on the corner overlooking the big blue Pacific Ocean. No one is ever seen coming or going and the family on the east coast must use the house as a getaway. A tiny garage faces west on the low street side and a young man much older than the Wracks sits inside grooming a race prepared 427 Ford Cobra Race Car.  He started it once and the huge exhaust headers blooped melancholy percussions into the air at idle and then the car sped away. He must be Caroll Shelby.  One day the Wracks checked and he and his car were gone and the garage never opened again except once and it was full of paper boxes of documents.  No one was ever seen coming or going from the house but the gloom associated with the structure and the isolation and the overgrown plants told everyone the location was forbidden and not to be entered.  On Halloween, everyone avoided this place and even the most mischievous of us all refused to throw a lemon or rotten apple inside. The porch lights were never on and the curtains draped but two cars set in the driveway. On the north side were the Clothes. Mr. Clothes was a laid off aeronautic engineer blacklisted from employment in his profession. His tall wife became an administrator and knew Mr. Gold finger.  The Wracks never saw their daughter, but their son was the best piano player he has ever heard.  While shooting a BB gun at targets, he would play “for Elise” in a delicate and beautiful way no one could ever match. Bach, Tchaikovsky and Mozart were also played flawlessly. He could even duplicate the fruity texture of Mozart compositions exactly.  He played three hours a day every day and a musical ignoramus like the wracks could understand that he was something special.  He had a national piano recital that became a debacle and fiasco. In the middle of his act, he had a seizure of some sort and that was that.   His family declared war on the Gel’s. In middle age I still have not heard anyone who could play as well as he could.  The Wracks still wonders what happened to him. The Wracks understood he was a security cop at the local bank. Time moves on. Later on, in life the Wracks could hear him shoot a 22-rim fire gun in his back yard guarded by a huge pool filled with mosquitoes. A territorial female Rhodesian ridgeback would attack anyone who set foot on their property.  The dog eventually died of cancer and the Wracks moved away but the cast and the people of tranquil hills will live in memory and waking dreams forever. The ambiance in this community in Tranquil Hills was of silence, anonymity, conspiracy and foreboding.  People lived in a thick atmosphere of human want and emotion at the same time displaced from the mainstream like a salmon upstream out of water. The simple fact the Wracks reached adulthood living here was a miracle of rebirth and hope cast in a dark swamp deep in the mind of the collective unconscious. Kind of like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. That a situation like this shall ever occur in the space time continuum is improbable until the end of time and I want to thank everyone who made exodus timely and expeditious with all my heart and being.  The Wracks would not be surprised if somehow, someway it all burned to the ground. Os.

Yahweh give me peace of mind

And a life free from want

Until the end of time.