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Posts Tagged ‘Shepherd Canyon’

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Woodminster: South Pacific, Day Six — Shepherd Canyon, Part II

In Fiction, Theatre, Writing on August 21, 2017 at 11:52 am

(Do you have nipples, but no idea what’s going on in this story? Start here.)

Day Six, Shepherd Canyon: Sunday, 23 July 2017 — Part II

Returning to Fire Station No. 24 twenty-three years later, it hasn’t changed at all. It looks like a life-sized model of a child’s vintage-style firehouse, from the future. Hasbro, circa 2086.

I wasn’t quite sure how to get into the parking lot, so I drove up Shepherd Canyon a ways, safe and sane behind the wheel. Unlike my jaunt down this road all those years ago.

When I turned around to head back toward the fire station, I took a look at that now notorious embankment.

I remember the sense, back in 1994, that if I braked it would result in destruction. I saw back then that the embankment got steeper ahead; it would launch the car up, either to the left across the road or into the trees above, then back down onto its roof. Time was running out.

I don’t know where I got the presence of mind; I was only 21 at the time — but I took my foot from the accelerator and — locking my arms — firmly eased the car to the left, down onto the road. The firetruck charged past us on our left, sudden and deafening. I braked, gently, for the curve ahead. Everything was fine.

It was as I drove past that very spot today that I remembered saying to Scott, “Hey, have you ever seen the old storybook firehouse?”

I was braking to turn into the parking lot of Fire Station No. 24 when it struck me:

If storms do blow we build a pyre
Inside our vintage firehouse

I was so shocked at the revelation that I sat there like an idiot, my left-turn signal blinking, until some asstongue in a Lexus honked at me. I turned off my blinker and headed for one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen in my life:

The Old Montclair Firehouse.

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Woodminster: South Pacific, Day Six — Shepherd Canyon

In Fiction, Theatre, Writing on August 20, 2017 at 12:06 pm

(Don’t get burned by spoilers! Start here.)

Day Six, Shepherd Canyon: Sunday, 23 July 2017

Fire has a mind of its own.

I headed out to Montclair early today, arriving around 9:00 am, heading to the fire station whose location I knew offhand: Oak Fire Station No. 24, on Shepherd Canyon Road. Why do I know where this specific fire station is? Simple: I like winding roads, and in my early 20’s, I liked to drive on them at dangerous speeds, blasting the James Bond theme on the stereo.

My friend Scott and I thought we were writing a musical. We were meeting Elsa, Scott’s girlfriend, for dinner at her sister’s house in Montclair that evening. This was … 1993? 1994? Anyway, I decided it would be fun to drive Scott up Shepherd Canyon Road at about 80 mph, blasting a special driving mix tape on the stereo: James Bond, Peter Gunn, Mission Impossible and … the Overture from Candide. One of these things is not like the others …

Scott was not at all certain that this was a good idea, but – galvanized with the armor of youthful ignorance – I rocketed up the canyon in my sister’s blue Saturn. Because of course, the best way to risk life, limb and property is in a borrowed car.

It was as we were coming back down Shepherd Canyon toward Snake road, in the last long curve to the right, that the car began to run up onto the embankment. I think we were doing 85 mph. Scott raked the air with his hands, right-left-right-left, like a cat; mouth agape, teeth bared, a grotesque sculpture: silent, the intensity of his hands increasing as we edged up toward certain doom. The car antenna whipped weeds off the embankment above us.

Sirens and the blaring horn of a firetruck: there, ahead of us, Fire Station No. 24 was being called to action.

I was not certain we could stop in time.