Film crews are the new donut loiterers, taking over for the PD, who are here too. This patch of cactus farms and grape acreage, neither a there there nor a nowhere, is a ready-made mountain backdrop hacksawed out of the hillside enough to be seen but mesas' away from being measured by the public relations firms. A train comes once a week, the only contact it seems with the outside world except for the cultural exchange at the Walmart. Horse trails meander onto Main Street and the hills crawl with Hobie Cats.
The trimmed fat of the cattle lands has been rendered into developers’ Ponzi dreams, complete with happy people seemingly bussed in, who seek the exurbian perfection of lake skiing and vineyard ballooning, the same name brand stores as every other strip-mall delivery locale in alien nation but operating on some alternative timeline without customers, barren of the duende of human misery as well, not near enough the homeless populations of LA, San Diego and even Riverside to provide any sense of things lost, wasted, of who, in the contrast, you are.
Thus there is a sadness, at how we never know them and they never know us. They’ve gone with the clouds into the mustard, holding something they want us to see but it is only the distance, foreign and tantalizingly vague, not the confirmation they expect that it is real. It could only be that if we capitulate to the roadside circulars, call it a here, as we could, in theory, anywhere the longing machine doesn’t pre-record, and attend to the dust that attaches to its fabric as a mark of distinction. Instead, we try in vain to distinguish it from any other Anytown USA on any other temporary planet.
The way there is long, the way back familiar. The narrative arc caught a few snaps of recognizable life to be peeled back into the Burbank froth batter turner. But no trace of Temecula remains, for all our attempts to see ourselves in it. Home is nothing, it turns out, without the people you know.
