I used to think the most foreign place I’d ever been was Three
Rivers, Texas, a truck-stop town about halfway between Corpus Christi and San
Antonio, where I worked on a construction crew for a few months at the end of
1979. That, or the country of Romania, which I visited during the Ceausescu
era: a through-the-looking-glass panorama of Soviet-style housing blocks and
empty boulevards, where the restaurants served cabbage three meals a day. But
once I moved to Southern California, I began to realize that foreignness can
be found in the most unlikely locations; that it is less a state of being than
a state of mind. California, after all — as Walt Whitman once wrote of himself
— contains multitudes, and among the most foreign of them is the Carrizo Plain.

The Carrizo Plain is like a Southern California version of the
Middle East, a barren expanse of rock and desert that extends north between
the Central Valley and the Sierra Madre Mountains, along the jagged spine of
the Caliente Range. It looks, I imagine, like Afghanistan or northern Iraq:
empty, windswept, sparsely settled, unchanged and unchanging since the dawn
of time. Unlike those places, however, you don’t need an expeditionary force
to visit the Carrizo; all you have to do is drive 75 miles north from Los Angeles
on I-5, exiting at the mountain town of Frazier Park, near the crest of Tejon
Pass. From there, it’s a quick jaunt through the northeast corner of Los Padres
National Forest down to the town of Maricopa, where the Carrizo spreads out
like a geographic question mark. Twenty miles north, the Temblor Range cuts
the vista with its looping curves and chasms, rocky hillsides slit with gullies
where the earth has pulled apart. Off to the west, Soda Lake dots the horizon
in a glossy crescent, heat waves shimmering off its surface in wisps of gauze.
Pull off the road, walk back from the shoulder 15, even 10, feet, and it’s like
no road has ever existed — like there’s nothing here at all. This is about as
far as you can get from Los Angeles — not just in Southern California, but anywhere
— a blank slate, a terrain of imagination, of possibility and terror, of abiding
fear and awe.

When I use words like awe and terror, I’m not being
hyperbolic: The Carrizo is also the best spot in California to come face to
face with the San Andreas Fault, which cuts the rocky plain floor like an attenuated
seam. Once, at Wallace Creek, where over the last four millennia the San Andreas
has put a 400-plus-foot dogleg into a formerly straight streambed, I climbed
down into the fault trace and waited for an earthquake; the last time this segment
ruptured, in 1857, the surface slip measured 31 feet. It’s impossible to stand
here and not be reminded of your insignificance, a feeling heightened by the
Carrizo’s wildness: the stone and wind and emptiness, the silence and the sky.
In such a landscape, time becomes elastic, open-ended, as if we had somehow
walked out into eternity itself.

Of course, as with everything in California, the Carrizo is hardly
as unspoiled as it once was, and the further east you go, the more contemporary
life creeps in. Yet here as well, it’s a peculiar kind of contemporary life
— rough, unpolished, with many of its scars exposed. On Highway 33, which runs
south from Coalinga before bottoming out past Maricopa, Amoco and Chevron have
built enormous oil fields that stretch back from both sides of the road. At
their most extensive, just north of McKittrick, the wells reach to the horizon,
thousands of them pumping, bobbing like mechanical birds. Pickups rumble past
as men in hardhats check pipelines that wind out of the fields to front the
road. For another moment, on this stretch of blacktop, you might imagine yourself
in the Middle East again, although a more secular Middle East this time, the
strategic region where we wage our wars. Then, you pull into McKittrick, with
its 1930s-era red brick hotel and its general store. And just like that, you’re
back in California, in the alien territory of the Carrizo Plain.