Exodus » Sandra

EXODUS » SANDRA

It is very cold — as the sun starts lighting up the sky. I do the graveyard dialysis session for Voyager in Redding, California. This type of session is for patients that need a longer and gentler dialysis: 23 patients and I spend eight hours together starting from 10 p.m.. Almost everyone sleeps, although some watch late night television.

I hate the cold, but today is the beginning of a new life. Or at least a vacation. My first marker is near Phoenix, which should be ‘a tad’ warmer. It is a long drive (maybe 13 hours), but is super-wide freeways as soon as I reach I-5 until I get off the I-10. With a tank full of gas, my Prius should be able to get to Los Angeles before it — I hear some people personify and name their cars, but that seems very nerdy to me — needs to be refilled. My guess is I will stop a couple times on the way for Peets and In-n-Out, so it might take me more like nine hours to get to Pasadena where I change direction and head pure east.

The drive down I-5 is fascinating: California is like a giant garden where instead of hoses coming from your house to water various trees and plants you are growing, the water cascades down from the Sierras through aqueducts and rivers to reach huge tracts of plants and trees… which are growing food for the whole nation. I can see the rivers cross under the highway headed west for the coastal populations as I come down from Redding. Later I can see the aqueducts weaving back and forth with the I-5 to support all the farms along the way to Los Angeles. Large tracts of planted vegetation organized into various kinds of patterns. Depending on the angle of the field, they look like they are just in rows. But something about the repetition also makes them appear to be laid out in diagonals that match hexagons. And in the rear-view mirror, different columns and diagonals appear.

Many of the fields are completely brown and dry. A few have water flooding parts of them. Clearly the amount of water these farms are getting varies a lot. And none of them are getting as much as they would like. This is even a year we aren’t officially in a drought… yet. But the water a farm is allocated is based on decades

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of water rights and the needs of the many, which clearly outweighs the needs of the few… or the one.

While I progress to Los Angeles, I do-si-do with the aqueducts a dozen more times. I also read a dozen billboards saying “No Water… No Jobs!”, “Where water flows… food grows!”, and similar.

At the base of the ‘Grapevine’, the part of the I-5 that winds over the Tehachapis mountains north of Los Angeles, I study one of the largest visible slights against those farmers: a giant pump system designed to push millions of gallons of aqueduct water over the grapevine with me. A couple million gallons each minute. Three billion a day. A trillion gallons a year. All streaming by the farms on their merry way to quench the thirsts of the people and the lawns of Los Angeles. I can’t imagine why those farmers are so angry.

I stop in Pasadena — because it is a nice city along the highways to Phoenix. And it provides a good turnaround point. If I just gasup and get back on the I-5 North, I will be home for dinner.

To ponder this decision point, I visit Jones Coffee Roasters. Besides good coffee, they have a giant, crowned, lamb mural. Praying to the lamb does not give me insight. In the end, the sugar in the kouign-amann drives me forward to Phoenix. Or maybe I am driven forward by the resentment for the years I was sent to do dialysis in Redding… when I would prefer to be in San Diego or somewhere warm.

The trip from Pasadena to Phoenix — provides a very consistent scenery… of desert. And more desert. And towns along the desert. And casinos along the desert. And Coachella where the San Andreas fault (running through the desert) meets the I-10. So a view of… a deep (but narrow) chasm in the desert.

If I had the time to stop along the way to Phoenix, I could visit Sherman tanks, fake dinosaurs, and strange-looking Joshua trees.

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But I am in a hurry, so those are not options however enticing they might be.

It is after dark when I exit the 101 — (a circle route around greater Phoenix area) for the Courtyard in Scottsdale. This is near the Mayo Clinic, which is a major player in liver and kidney diseases, so if anything goes wrong, I suspect they will know what to do with me. I can look for the marker tomorrow, when the stores open. I don’t know why the markers aren’t out in the wild. My guess is that a bunch of people looking around a park might seem like it was a geocaching location, and then other people would start snooping around there as well.

I check in, unwind, and get some sleep before dragging myself out of bed at four in the morning: several hours before normal on a Saturday. I don’t yet know where I am headed next, so the suspense is kind-of killing me.

The Home Depot in Scottsdale — opens at 5 a.m. on Saturdays. This must be why they picked this location: so you could get cracking at the dawn of the day, or visit at 10 p.m. after you arrived in Phoenix. There could be a dozen markers hidden in here, and unless you walked all the aisles, and were a vampire, you wouldn’t have found any of them. But I had an aisle and shelf number (Aisle 21, Bay 007), so I only had to look in a few square feet. Actually, what I was given by the V-WAN was “Go home to 472-21-7”. Somehow that combined with my cohort number would be a marker and tell me how to get to the next marker.

I believe the first part of this code means ‘Home Depot’ because that company is mentioned prominently in a lot of the founder’s materials. Home Depot also has a location numbered ‘472’ that is located the right distance away. We were told the first marker could be twelve or more hours away. Ideally these pieces of information are not well known, so those outside our community would have a harder time deciphering the code than vampires would.

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The critical obfuscation though — comes from a vampirespecific talent: the ability to see blood in even small quantities. I go to Aisle 21, Bay 007, and look around. There are a bunch of Milwaukee tool sets containing power drills and impact drivers. On each of them are all the normal pricing, barcode, and descriptive information. And on each of them, in the brilliantly bright color of blood — although only a few droplets per inch — is my cohort number and the next marker: “Go chuck wine at five-one-nine”

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