CELEBRATE! : Orange County’s First 100 Years : A VISION OF THE FUTURE : ‘OH SEE’

Ramona flew a lot. Often, Kevin would hear a voice from above, and, looking up, he would see her in her little solo craft. Now he was beside her, and it felt as if anything were possible, anything at all.

At the glider port on Fairhaven, Kevin Claiborne and Ramona Sanchez prepped her family’s two-person flyer, a Northrop Condor, and then hooked it to the takeoff sling. When they were safely strapped in Ramona freed the sling, and with a jerk they were hauled down the runway, pedaling like mad. Ramona pulled back on the flaps, the sling uncoupled, they shot up into the air and then caught the breeze and rushed higher, like a kite pulled into the wind by an enthusiastic runner. They yelled out loud and pedaled hard, pushing the little plane upward with every stroke. The flyer’s huge prop whirred rapidly in front of them, but two-seaters were not as efficient as one-seaters, and they had to grind as if racing to get the craft up to 200 feet, where the afternoon sea breeze caught the wide wings and lifted them.

Ramona turned them into the breeze with a gull’s swoop. They were flying under their own power, fulfilling the ancient dream of Daedalus. Around them in the air were other air bikes, curving in the course of invisible traffic lanes. They relaxed the pace of their pedaling, settled into a long-distance rhythm and swooped through the sky over Orange County.

Hard work. It was one of the weird glories of their time that the highest technologies were producing artifacts that demanded more intense physical labor than ever before, as in the case of human-powered flight, which required extreme efforts from even the best endurance athletes. But once such flight was possible, who could resist it?

Not Ramona Sanchez; she flew a lot. Often while working on rooftops, Kevin would hear a voice from above, and looking up he would see her in her little solo craft, a Hughes Dragonfly, making a cyclist’s whir and waving down like a sweaty air spirit. Now he was beside her, and she said, “Let’s go to Newport and look at the waves.”

They soared and dipped in the onshore wind. From time to time, Kevin glanced at Ramona’s legs, working in tandem next to his. Her thighs were longer than his, her quads bigger and better defined.

Kevin shook his head, surprised by the dreamlike intensity of his vision, by how well he could see her. They had been friends all their lives, but now that Ramona and her partner, Alfredo Blair, had broken up, Ramona was a single woman. It was remarkable what a change that made in Kevin’s perception of her.

He glanced down at the Newport Freeway, crowded as usual. Seen from above, the four bike lanes were a motley collection of helmets, backs and pumping knees over spidery lines of metal and rubber. The two car lanes were seamed down the middle by silvery guidance tracks over which the little rental cars hummed--blue roof, red roof, blue roof--moving faster than the big trolleys lumbering along the center divider, but slower than the quickest cyclists.

At each on-ramp to the freeway, there was a crowd where people were checking out cars from the depots and waiting to slot onto the tracks. Radical traffic congestion had made Orange County one of the first areas in the nation to use this system: trolley lines down freeway center dividers; public cars rented and driven station to station on computer-guided track systems, and two-for-one matching bike lanes, with rental bikes at every trolley stop. The inconvenience of the rental cars and the flatness of Orange County’s coastal plain had eventually made bicycles the transport mode of choice.

As they cut curves in the air, keeping an eye out for the other flyers dotting the clouds, they passed over buildings Kevin had worked on. A house reflecting sunlight from a roof of cloud-gel, which shifted from white to clear depending on temperature; garages renovated to cottages; warehouses set under parks; offices afloat on ponds; a bell tower. His work, tucked here and there in the trees. It was fun to see it, to point it out, to remember the challenge of the task met and dealt with.

Kevin was what people called a “bioarchitect,” and most of his work involved rebuilding and retrofitting the miserable condo boxes built before the turn of the century. Using new materials and designs, it was possible to make the average house or apartment complex almost completely self-sufficient in terms of energy and even food--each household a little farm, in effect.

Ramona laughed to hear him talk. “It must be nice to see your whole resume like this.”

“Yeah,” he said, suddenly embarrassed. He had been rattling on.

She was looking at him with a smile.

Tall eucalyptus windbreaks cut the broad expanse of the plain into giant rectangles, as if the coastal basin were a quilt of homes and orchards, green and yellow crops, commerce centers, orange groves. There, where South Coast Plaza used to stand, was the experimental park where they were trying to regrow the area’s natural foliage, now yellow with mustard, although some argued mustard itself was a latecomer.

And there were the green streets of Santa Ana, paved with a genetically designed grass that was tough enough to take any traffic--so tough, in fact, that it was running amok and practically taking over the town. The other municipalities of the county, each with its own character, each wielding the powers of a kind of globally networked city-state, had looked on Santa Ana’s plight and decided that it would be best to purchase a different strain of street grass.

It was a mountaintop view. Kevin’s lungs felt stuffed with wind; he was buoyant at the sight of so much land. The big interchange of the San Diego and Newport freeways looked like a concrete pretzel, and the empty San Joaquin Hills were like a rumpled green blanket. Beyond the freeway interchange lay lots of water, reflecting the sunlight like scraps of mirror thrown on the land--streams, fishponds, reservoirs, the marsh of Upper Newport Bay. It was low tide, and a lot of gray tidal flats were revealed, surrounded by reeds and clumps of trees. They could smell the salt stink of them on the wind, even up where they were. Thousands of ducks and geese bobbed on the water, making a beautiful speckled pattern. “Migration again,” Ramona said pensively. “Time for change.”

The afternoon onshore wind was bringing in low ocean clouds, as often happened in late spring. The Torrey pines loved it, but it was no fun to fly in, as Ramona pointed out. Kevin said, “Well, what with tonight’s council meeting, it won’t do me any harm to get back early.”

Ramona shifted the controls and they made a wide turn over Irvine. Mirrored glass boxes in the industrial parks glinted like children’s blocks, gold and blue and copper. Kevin glanced at Ramona and saw she was blinking rapidly. Crying? What was this? Ah. He’d mentioned the council meeting.

Kevin was going to be placed on the El Modena Town Council that night, having narrowly won an election running for the embattled Green party. Ramona’s ex-partner, Alfredo Blair, was going to be sworn in as El Modena’s new mayor. In the normal course of things, she would have been attending the council meeting and the inaugural party beforehand, an important part of a big celebration.

Damn! He had simply forgotten. And they’d been having such fun. He was an idiot. Impulsively he touched the back of Ramona’s hand. “Sorry,” he said. “I forgot.”

“Oh,” she said, voice unsteady. “I know.” She grimaced at him. “It’s been pretty upsetting.”

“I can imagine. You were together a long time.”

“Fifteen years!” she said. “Nearly half my life!” She struck the stick angrily and the Condor dipped left, making Kevin wince.

She began to tell him about what had happened, which was interesting but hard to concentrate on, as occasionally she would punch the frame above the controls, making Kevin and the plane jump. It was great, he thought, that she was letting it out like this and taking him into her confidence. If only she wouldn’t emphasize her points with those hard blows to the frame. He swallowed anxiously, determined not to interrupt her thoughts with mundane worries.

So she continued to tell him what life with Alfredo had been like. “There were so many things he was into that you couldn’t even believe it.” Bang! “He was always so damned busy!” Bang-bang-bang!

“You have to be, to be a hundred,” Kevin said cautiously.

“And he could be two hundreds! He could be a millionaire if they still allowed it!” Income capping, you see, had made millionaires a thing of the past. Nowadays the goal for those interested in personal wealth was to struggle against the increasing resistance of taxation to reach “the cap.” Those who did were popularly known as hundreds, and they were entitled to direct a great deal of their “overhundred” to projects they were interested in, so that they became, in effect, small foundations. Thus personal ambition still had a lot of elbow room, even in the context of their communal society.

And Alfredo had as much ambition as anybody. Kevin said, “That kind of work must take a lot of time, huh?”

Ramona cried, “It takes your whole life!” Bang!

Kevin looked down at the treetops apprehensively. They were getting closer to them every minute, but Ramona was still absorbed by the memory of the break-up--to the point where she again began to blink rapidly.

“You two were in a feedback loop,” Kevin said, trying to stick to analysis. A relationship had feedback loops, like any other ecology--like history itself. A movement in one direction or another could quickly spiral out of control. Kind of like a tailspin, now that Kevin thought about it. Harder than hell to re-stabilize after you fell into one of those. In fact, people were killed all the time in crashes caused by them. Uncontrolled feedback loop. He tried to remember the few flying lessons he had taken.

But it could work both ways, he thought. Upward spiral, a great flourishing of the spirit, everything feeding into it . . . even history could take such a turn. He kept his eye on the controls, on Ramona’s vehement right fist. He found her story rather amazing. He didn’t understand Alfredo. Imagine the chance to live with this woman, his friend.

e banished the thought and looked at handsome old Tustin below them, the Victorian houses gleaming in the sun. Close. Very close. Too close. But this was important; she was confiding in him. “So,” he said, thinking to go right at it, “you broke up.”

“Yeah. I don’t know; I was getting really angry, but I probably would have stuck it out. But Alfredo, he got mad at me too, and . . . . “ She started to cry.

“Ah, Ramona,” Kevin said. Wrong tack to take there.

And suddenly he had to pedal hard, against enormous resistance; she didn’t seem to be pushing at all. Not a good moment to bother her, though. He gritted his teeth and began to pump like a fiend.

Their flyer dropped anyway, sideslipping to the right. They were dropping toward Red Hill. Ramona’s eyes were squeezed shut; she was too upset to notice anything. Kevin found his concern for her distracted. Fatal accidents in these things were not all that infrequent. Off to their right rose the great tree-house village of El Toro, the branches of its genetically designed giant sycamores filled with rooms and rampways, an entire aerial town flying colorful kites that lofted toward Saddleback, filled with anarchists and the county’s wildest citizens; its magnificent trees would have made a beautiful final sight, but Kevin was not comforted.

“Sorry,” he said, pedaling violently. “But . . . uh . . . . “ He took a hand from the frame to pat her shoulder, briefly. “Maybe . . . um . . . . “

“It’s OK,” she said, hands over her face, rubbing hard. “Sometimes I can’t help it.”

Then she looked up. “Hey, we’re about to run into Red Hill.”

“Um, yeah. True.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“Well, I, um. I didn’t want to bother you.”

“Oh, Kevin!” She laughed, sniffed, reached over to peck his cheek. Then she started to pedal again and turned them toward home.

Kevin’s heart filled--with relief, certainly--but also with affection for her. It was a shame she had been hurt like that. Although he had no desire to see her and Alfredo achieve a reconciliation. None at all. He said, very cautiously, “Maybe it’s better you guys broke up now, if it was going to happen anyway.”

She nodded briefly.

They circled toward El Modena’s little glider port. A Dragonfly ahead of them dropped onto it, heavy as a bee in cold weather. Skillfully Ramona guided them down, and their shadow preceded them toward the grassy runway. They dropped to an elevation where the whole plain seemed nothing but treetops. Ramona’s small smile, the trees everywhere--Kevin felt like the breeze was cutting right through his chest. To think she was a free woman. And sitting here beside him.

She brought them down to the runway in a graceful swoop, and they landed as gently as a puff of dandelion seed. Quick roll to a stop. They unstrapped, stood unsteadily, flexed legs that felt like big blocks of wood. “Whew,” Ramona said. “Estoy cansada (I’m tired).”

Kevin nodded. “Great flight, Ramona.”

“Yeah?” And as they walked the plane off the strip she touched him briefly and said, “You’re a good friend, Kevin.”

Which might have been a warning, but Kevin wasn’t listening. After such a flight, tucked in the avocado groves of his little hometown, it felt as if anything were possible, anything at all. You could seize history in your hands and throw it like a softball, in any direction you pleased. He still felt her touch. “I want to be,” he said, feeling his voice quiver. He didn’t think it could be heard. “I want to be.”

DR, COLOR, LAMUT & JAKESEVIC