Dawn Patrol

128

Boone drives past the reed bed and keeps going until he finds a place where he can turn off and see the fields and the road.

Now he sits and looks at the fields, silver and dewy as the sun starts to rise behind the hills to the east. On the far side of the fields, where they dip to meet the river, the reed bed stands like a wall, sealing the fields off from the rest of the world, blending into a line of trees that old man Sakagawa planted as a windbreak so many years ago.

On the other side of the fields, on a small rise near its eastern edge, old Sakagawa's house sits in a small grove of lemon and walnut trees. The old man will be getting up soon, Boone thinks, if he isn't already, sitting at his table with his tea and his rice with pickled vegetables.

The workers are already coming out, filing onto the fields with their tools over their shoulders, like the rifles of soldiers moving out on a early-morning mission. An army of phantoms, they come from nowhere. They hide at night in the creases and folds of the San Diego landscape, emerge in the soft light of the early dawn, coming into the open to work, and then disappear again at dusk into the wrinkles and seams, the last unwanted places.

They're the invisible, the people we don't see or choose not to see, even in the bright light of day. They're the unspoken truth, the unseen reality behind the California dream. There before we wake up, gone before we fall asleep again.

Boone settles back and watches them start to work. They fan out in well-organized lines, practiced, almost ritualistic, silent. They work with their backs bent and their heads down. They work slowly, in a methodic rhythm. There's no hurry to get done. The field will be here all day, was here yesterday, will be here tomorrow.

But not for many tomorrows, Boone thinks. He wonders if these men know that someday soon they will not be out here. It will be the bulldozers and road graders that will come out at dawn, machines, not men who work like a collective machine. Exhaust fumes instead of sweat.

In place of the fields, there will be luxury homes and condominiums. A shopping plaza or a mall. In place of the workers, there will be residents and shoppers and diners. And these men will have disappeared to some other netherworld.

Boone feels a bit of welcome warmth come through the car window. The sun has crested the mountains.