A red letter day, thought Leland Hendy as his feet pounded the dirt streets of Mendocino City, Mendocino County, California. It was late and hot and September, 1933.

“Seven years of sawdust and sweat, and now I’m chewed up and spat out.” He spat for emphasis, creating a shiny, reddish brown globule in the dust. “Asshole foreman will be looking for his own job soon enough.” Work was not easy to find, but Leland sure wasn’t going home to Missouri with his tail between his legs.

The sprawling north woods had harbored sawmills for 65 years or more, the measure of a workingman’s life. San Francisco had taken down its towering ancient redwoods for its wooden skeleton, and did so again after the earthquake broke that city’s bones. Men had carved tracks through it to topple the giants, then floated them down the aptly named Big River for men like Leland to shape them for other men’s houses. The giants had now all fallen and the people of those hard times demanded little of the forest’s remaining trees. So the lumber company retired the mill and it now was past.

Leland went over his options. Ruby was probably at the hotel sweeping. His mind took in her smooth skin and the way her yellow uniform hugged her hips. But she would probably have heard by now, and so might be even less enthusiastic than usual. Ruby was too young, not even legal. But she was old enough to know that unemployed meant unkept promises.

“That’s one more thing done and past,” he thought. In the present, there was the chophouse or there was getting drunk. These two consuming appetites fought for a bit before he headed over to the speakeasy.

The Blind Pig had a sliding slot in an unmarked, blue door. To enter, patrons had to peer into the black void and utter a kind of passphrase, “I want to see the blind pig.” Everyone called the booze smugglers “blind pigs” including the police. Mendocino’s policemen could often be found inside in any case. Today, due to unusually high demand, security was even more lax. Leland knocked and the door quickly revealed a dim, crowded, stinking room. He coughed and shoved his way through the herd of the newly unemployed to the bar.

Hours later, and still pissed, Leland lurched out the door clutching a bottle. The whisky ran through his veins, like it did most days, only more so. Today though, the whisky had some fellow travelers. Tuberculosis had made the leap from its former home in the bartender’s lungs. Years later, Leland would see its angry red-stained microscopic corpses on a glass slide in a desert sanatorium. Now, though, the sun sank into the southwestern ocean, and iridescent fog crawled over the edge of the bluffs across the street. He wandered towards it.

Municipal Mendocino had a simple sanitary policy then. The town designated a part of the bluffs as the dump, and the unwanted went over and onto the rocks below. Temperance League types would sometimes convene there to educate the public. They would throw confiscated moonshine over a single bottle at a time, a lesson lost on Leland and most of Mendocino. Trash of all sorts regularly met the same fate. Leland was not so out of bounds when he urinated over the edge into the foggy nothingness.

He collapsed on the grass and listened to the surf industriously batter the shore. Long ago, schooners had anchored there, bobbing and waiting for the lumber to roll down chutes from the first mill on the bluff before the company raised the second mill down by the river. Now some rusting old machines looked back up at him through a break in the mist alongside piles of broken glass and twisted wood and wire. Leland swallowed and bitterly toasted Mendocino’s remnants, draining and lifting the green whisky bottle to the sky for the moon to shine through.

He thought about his parents’ farm and how his callous father had shouted after him that he would be better off in California. He thought about his brother who had left home with him and now worked as a bouncer on the Sunset Strip down in Los Angeles. He thought about Ruby again and felt restless. He thought about that Hollywood starlet playing the fetching heiress in Platinum Blonde. He thought about his nearly three decades on this earth and hoped the next ones would bring a bit more fun.

That is where he would go, south to Los Angeles.

He hurled the empty green Emerald Isles whisky bottle into the darkness and listened to it crash and tinkle on the rocks and fade into the waves’ white noise.

~~~OOO~~~

The Pacific Ocean quickly shrugged off this insult and moved on to its ceaseless business. The sun and moon dragged the Pacific’s tide waters up and down the Northern California coast twice a day. The Mendocino bluffs retreated imperceptibly over the decades. Grey whales paraded in their ever smaller numbers north and south past the bluffs with the seasons. The whales finally went out of fashion with the people of the Pacific fringes, and made a comeback. Tuna, not so much. The California Current still carried cold water south, but the warming world gave the Pacific a bit of a fever as the millennium approached.

~~~OOO~~~

“Again, what was the business model?” Steve Jones asked the surrounding woods. Once a Mendocino veterinarian, Steve was now just another suddenly jobless tech worker, worse yet a middle aged one.  He navigated his new Toyota Prius onto the familiar branch off highway 101 North, half watching the display tell him his miles per gallon in real time. The mute redwood trunks lined highway 128 like cathedral pillars and enveloped Steve and his Prius in a brown gloom. The CEO had a business case, taken her cut to close down the company while he’d been fired by some preachy 27 year old. But why had anyone ever thought selling 25 pound bags of dog food below cost and shipping them in cardboard boxes around the planet was a sustainable business model in the first place? For a moment he was back in his San Francisco cubicle, spreadsheets swimming before his bleary eyes, each shady profit and loss statement trailing its red negative bottom line.

Steve’s evaluation of the corporate prospects of Pets.com echoed the received wisdom by that first September of the 2000’s. Only two years before, though, the 1998 world wide web had been wide open and minting money, wisdom or no wisdom. The skilled and ambitious thronged to the Bay Area from across the seas to work sweatshop hours for something called equity participation. Even a fiftyish veterinarian a four drive to the north was not immune to Silicon Valley’s all-consuming allure. But venture capital giveth and venture capital taketh away. The Pets.com promise shattered like a thin blown glass bubble in a record 292 days.

Steve thought it was bad enough to be in this latest chapter of the jilted, left standing at the altar by faithless capital, but he also knew there were costs that the spreadsheets could not calculate. Those endless days spent staring at numbers on dark monitors and taking abuse thinly veiled as management happened to also be Steve’s mother’s last dwindling days on earth. And, his girlfriend, April, dumped him. “In that glass office building, you are like a fish in an aquarium. I hope you escape to the sea someday,” she said just before she took their drooling Yellow Labrador back to her house for good. His own childhood home and the heavy task of sorting through his mother’s former possessions.

A blue wave of regret washed over him and salt water welled up in his eyes. Steve thought of various ways to delay the inevitable reckoning at his mother’s house and the funeral the next day. Face your feelings, his psychiatrist had said, and these pills will help. Against medical advice, he settled upon Panthea Vineyards instead.

He parked the Prius alongside the espaliered green grapevines. Like Napa, the Andersen Valley had changed a great deal since he had hiked its woods with his mother when she was between boyfriends. When he was young, his mother had pointed to the barns and told him that they were going to move in with the horses. She said they couldn’t be worse than cleaning up after the hotel guests where she worked. Now farms were vineyards, and barns were tasting rooms. Steve supposed the forests were still the forests. His city friends said Panthea had famed Pinots. April loved Pinot. Time to spend that severance package, he thought without pleasure.

Closing time found him staring unsteadily at his car, wondering if he should drive. But drive he did, without incident, through the Navarro River Valley Glades into the sunset on Pacific Coast Highway, north past the graceful sea arches and yawning estuaries of the Mendocino coast, through the strip malls of Fort Bragg, past the turnoff to April’s house, past MacKerricher State Beach Park and a few blocks more to the doorstep of his mother’s house.

He could not bring himself to open the door. He turned away and walked toward the sound of the surf and the park entrance. Just beyond, a former seaside dump had become a tourist attraction.

The sign read:

From Trash to Treasure
All park features are protected by law
and may not be removed or disturbed,
including beach glass found at Glass Beach.

Steve and his mother had always laughed at this sign – who was going to stop them? A whole sun drenched beach full of rainbow glass sparkled in his memory. As a child, he used to order the smooth round glass jewels on their kitchen table: red, brown, yellow, blue, green. His mother collected the rare ruby red ones, remnants of apothecary bottles, because of her name.

His gaze fell to his shoes kicking up the wave-polished glass, their sparkle dulled by the gathering twilight. He thought about his mother, trying to remember her as a younger woman rather than in her final illness. He thought about veterinary school, the smell of the pigs and cattle. He thought about his dormant practice on Pacific Coast Highway. He thought about how badly he had blown it with April this last wasted year in the city. She might be at the funeral.
He would try to make it up to her and stick around for a change.
He scoured the beach for a ruby red, but there weren’t any and the beach glass was smaller than he remembered. It was getting too dark to see, so he picked up a nice emerald green one to take home.