The Tortilla Curtain

could see a skein of fog unraveling across the water below. The evening would be cool. She thought of her own house then, of Delaney going round opening the windows and turning on the big slow ceiling fans to gather in the breeze while the salad chilled and the pasta steamed and Jordan kicked a ball against the garage door. If she hurried, she could be home by seven.
    But she didn't hurry. The more she thought of her own house, of her son, her husband, her solitary dog, the more enervated she felt. She lingered on the doorstep, wandered through the cavernous rooms like a ghost, ran her hand over the felt of the billiard table as if she were caressing the short stiff nap at the base of Jordan's neck. She was just checking to see that everything was in order, that was all, but in a way, a growing way, a way that almost overwhelmed her, she didn't want to leave, not ever again.
    Late morning, the house silent, light muted, telephone off the hook. Delaney sat in his office, a converted bedroom fitted but with desk, couch and filing cabinets, leaning into a pool of artificial light while the sun cut precise slashes between the slats of the drawn blinds. He'd been out earlier with shovel and pickax, the heavy clay soil like asphalt, to dispose of the dog's remains, putting an end to that chapter. Mercifully. And now he was back at work, severed limbs, distraught wives, frightened children and public meetings behind him, putting the finishing touches to his latest column: PILGRIM AT TOPANGA CREEK _Who am I, manzanita stick in hand and nylon pack clinging to my shoulders like a furled set of wings, out abroad in the wide world? Who am I, striding into the buttery glaze of evening sun amidst stands of bright blooming mustard that reach to my elbows and beyond? I'm a pilgrim, that's all, a seer, a worshiper at the shrine. No different from you, really: housebound half the day, a slave to the computer, a man who needs his daily fix of electricity as badly as any junkie needs his numinous drug. But different too, because I have these mountains to roam and these legs to carry me. Tonight__--_this evening--I am off on an adventure, a jaunt, a peregrination beneath the thin skin of the visible to breathe in the world around me as intensely as Wordsworth's leech-gatherer and his kin: I am climbing into the fastness of the Santa Monica Mountains, within sight and sound of the second-biggest city in the country (within the city limits, for that matter), to spend a solitary night.__
    _I am excited. Bursting. Thrilling like a plucked string. For while I know these hills in the broad light of midday, and I know them in early morning and evening (and I've tasted them, as you might taste an exotic fruit) between the curtains of the night, this will be my first sojourn here under the stars. From the moment my wife drops me off at the Trippet Ranch trailhead with a kiss and a promise to come for me at nine the next morning, I feel a primeval sense of liberation, of release, and as I wend my way upward through the stands of undiscouraged shrubs, I can't help singing out their names in a sort of mantra--bush poppy, sumac, manzanita, ceanothus, chamise, redshanks__--_over and over again.__
    _The mustard is an interloper here, by the way, an annual introduced by the Franciscan padres, who, so it is said, broadcast handfuls of seed along the Camino Real to mark the trail, but of course they had an ulterior motive too: this is the same mustard that winds up in a jar on our table. It blooms after the rains and transforms the hills, yellow flowers stretching to the horizon in pointillistic display, but by this time of the year it has already begun to fade. In a month there will be nothing left but shriveled leaves and dried-out stalks.__
    _By contrast, the manzanita and toyon, with their lode of palatable berries, are on for the long haul, as are our two hardy members of the rose family, chamise__ (Adenostoma fasciculatum) _and redshanks__ (Adenostoma sparsifolium). _Tough customers, these. They deposit toxins in the soil to inhibit germination of competing plants and carry resins in their woody stems to feed the periodic brushfires that allow them to regenerate. They will see no rain__--_indeed, no moisture at all save for what little may drift in on the sea mist__--_till November or December. But there they are, holding the ground like an army keeping the sun at bay.__
    _I will spend the night not at the prescribed campground (Musch Ranch), but in