Terminal Island

A fine place to finally flicker out

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Terminal Island is a large, manmade island off the coast of Los Angeles home to the biggest port facility in the western hemisphere. It was built from an earlier island, Dead Man’s Island, which was dynamited in 1928 and used as fill for the future port. It is also home to Terminal Island Federal Corrections Institute, a federal prison often referred to as Club Fed due to its low security and waterfront real estate. Terminal Island was also the site of the terrible nonfiction novel I started during the pandemic.

In the novel, Barret, the book’s suicidal alcoholic narrator—having spent years watching homeless people start dumpster fires outside his apartment window as city street sweeping crews swerve around the islands of garbage obstructing all available street parking—in the book, Barret refuses to pay the 47 delinquent parking tickets he owes the City’s Office of Sanitation Services. The act of protest leads to his arrest and imprisonment at Terminal Island Federal Corrections Institute where, having finally reached a dead end, he begins to reflect on his life, in particular the failure of his cherished book project, a reminiscence that soon results in an attempt at bashing his brains out on the brick wall of his cell.

Afterwards, he is sedated and strapped to a bed in the old asylum wing of the damp and decaying prison. A nurse visits him periodically throughout the night offering strange assurances.

“There’s nothing more behind you...”

Very Cool!

I myself hadn’t thought much about that book until last Thursday when I found myself behind Terminal Island waiting to board the ferry to Catalina Island, twenty miles away. The memory of the book might have ruined my birthday, but fortunately the nausea of the boat ride briefly banished it. Until today.

Catalina Island - 4/5/24

I remember thinking that that Terminal Island book was the “workaround” I needed, the solution to the problem posed by my fiancé, Christina, who had threatened me with castration and death if I wrote the book I wanted to write, the book the Terminal Island book itself frequently referred to—a book about the nuclear meltdown at the Boeing-owned Santa Susana Field Laboratory at the end of the San Fernando Valley. The Terminal Island book was supposed to be not about the Laboratory so much as Los Angeles, a place the famed geographer Edward Soja called “The Aleph,” after a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, a single point in which every other in the universe can be seen “from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping, or confusion.” Somehow, I had the insane idea that by abandoning myself to a study of the All, I might through some unknown alchemical conversion open a plausible path to the One thing I had set my sights on for my second book: Santa Susana.

But it wasn’t so easy.

Only one week after entering my cell, they moved me to the old asylum wing at the southern tip of the island and kept me under close watch. I remember thinking it all quite fitting—especially as they slid the straight jacket over my arms, tightened the straps around me, and led me toward the bed—that I should finally end up in an asylum. Now and then over the years, often at night in a forest clearing somewhere high in California’s Sierra Nevada, I had sometimes imagined that for each of us there was a particular point plotted on a grid mapped across the globe. Our life’s journey consisted in tracking the coordinates, installing ourselves there, and dying in exact preordained posture, a position we would never discover until it was our last. And as I lay strapped down to the bed that night, following the moon as it crept beyond the heavy wrought iron bars, a steady drip of sedatives coursing through my veins, I thought that I had finally found my place. How poetic that it was plotted on Terminal Island, and even more so that the island had once been named Isla de Los Muertos, or more commonly, Dead Man’s Island.

Lying on my back, I tried to picture the rocks and mud below, the damp and salty earth not far beneath the foam green tiles that from the corner of my eye, which was then nearly swollen shut, appeared to pave a perfect grid extending outward forever, or at least as far as I could see in the partial light cast by the crescent moon. The view, reminiscent of the inscrutable mosaic Los Angeles presents from the portholes of a Boeing 747, made me temporarily hopeful. Perhaps I had already passed away. I am rising toward heaven, I thought, on my way to meet the angels, already a mile or so above the Angel City itself, which, as it happened, lay not terribly far behind me, in fact only a quarter mile across the harbor—somewhere inside that uncertain storm of light shivering within the tangled latticework of the giant shipping cranes whose great black bodies I could see silhouetted out the window if I forced my eyes as far to the right as possible before the pain blinded me. There they loomed on the colossal legs of their supporting frames, a line of shadowy monsters, the mast at the middle of their backs rising to a height behind their heads as the long boom of their necks appeared to reach out, sniffing toward the water.

I doubt many Americans know, but the fragrant things delivered to their door, whatever they buy at whichever store—bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam—much of it passes through those monsters’ fingers, which collectively handle nearly half of all imports to the United States. Over 17,000,000 twenty-foot standard shipping containers are unloaded each year at the combined ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the busiest port complex in the western hemisphere. The quantity of steel comprised by the containers alone, not to mention the products that fill every inch of their interiors, never mind the networks of complexity—and fossil fuel energy—that keep it all roving ceaselessly over the earth likely exceeds the power of any single human mind to fathom. Whenever I’ve thought about it in the past, I’ve tried to picture a single freight train wrapped three times around the planet. If the containers those cranes haul away throughout the course of one year were somehow attached back-to-back they would stretch as far as three equatorial rings; in three years the tip of those collective rings, bent straight and welded together, would scrape the milk white skin of the moon. In all likelihood, the containers do contain all things. A desire for sleep keeps most good people from contemplating them. Jorge Luis Borges, in “The Aleph,” admits as much. “I was afraid I would never again be free of all I had seen. Happily, after a few sleepless nights, I was visited once more by oblivion.” Yet many people, contrary to their desires, do end up dwelling on the cranes. In Oakland and Portland, Hamburg and Genoa, Rotterdam and New York, time and again wherever they tower you will hear someone comment on their shape and size. How many times walking near the water in some city I lived in or was visiting have I not heard a friend or seen a passing stranger suddenly freeze, an uneasy grin twisting their lips as they mouthed the words: “Aren’t the cranes… strange?” Evolutionary biologists would say it’s perfectly natural. Surrounded by technology and urbanity though we are, the human eye still clicks involuntarily toward such animal-like outlines. We are hardwired to detect them, always on the lookout for any sign of agency, ever alert to any shape or pattern, trace or trail that might reveal a presence, signify some potential for action, and if not assist our survival than potentially provide its ruin. Such evolutionary biologists would admit too that our brain’s agency detection system is actually a bit restless, hyperactive even, almost to the point of paranoia. I remember, in the course of research for my first book, reading one of the preeminent scholars in the field, a man who I happen to share a name with, Justin L. Barrett, who argued that we are actually predisposed to see things that are not there, and in a somewhat counterintuitive twist, that our misperception—which perhaps gave rise to our belief in God—was once a gift from an evolutionary standpoint. Our brain’s Hyperactive Agency Detection Device, HAADD, Barrett calls it, forever encourages us to imagine in the vaguest shape or sound, in a black shadow at the edge of the clearing, or a crackling of leaves beyond the moonlight, something sinister or even supernatural stalking in the periphery. “We constantly scan our environment for the presence of other people and nonhuman agents,” Barrett writes. “If you bet that something is an agent and it isn’t, not much is lost. But if you bet that something is not an agent and it turns out to be one, you could be lunch.” Fortunately, the shipping cranes do not climb off the docks and devour us like dinosaurs. We should laugh and forget them forever after that first confusion but the strange thing, at least in my experience, is that many do not. The cranes do not vanish into the invisible background tapestry that constitutes the everyday human world. Time and again, the eye circles back to their outlines. “Aren’t they strange?” It’s as if we’re never really sure that something isn’t there. And I guess I’m still not so sure either. Over the years I’ve begun to wonder if the human eye’s attraction might not turn on something deeper than mere primal paranoia, something more sinister than their resemblance to Jurassic monsters. Perhaps at work in their lingering allure may be not just a faculty leftover from our deepest past but also a sensitivity increasingly attuned toward the near future. The great long train those mighty cranes might compile, a train wrapped thirty times around the earth, stretching nearly one million miles in the span of a decade, in all likelihood there will come a day not terribly far away when that train ceases to grow and the untold loops it wound around the planet, while they fed the wide-open mouth of our human craving, they also, silently, slipped a noose around our necks. And the cranes were the hands that tied the knot… and it all started at Dead Man’s Island, which in any event I decided I had not left that night, not if I was still staring out from the pillow level across the water at those mammoth cranes.  

Somewhere to my left I heard footsteps, heels tapping on the foam green tiles. A nurse passed through the swinging doors and entered the old asylum wing. From out of the corner of my eye, in the half-light, she seemed almost to float across the room, her baggy white scrubs billowing about her as she held something close to her chest. For a moment, I imagined she was an angel, someone I had seen in Los Angeles several months prior. Christina was there that day at the Autry Museum of the American West. I remember she held her phone out, flicking her finger across the screen. “Can we go?” she moaned, playing Pokémon Go, while I stared across the hall at the figure of the pale, plump, blonde-haired goddess hovering over a sea of green prairie grass. For years I had wanted to visit the museum to handle a rare early copy of Father Juan Crespí’s California diary. I had no idea that the famous angel—the protagonist of John Gast’s painting American Progress, required curriculum for every American eighth grader—was housed in Los Angeles.

Indians and buffalo, bears and other monsters flee the light that falls before her toes as great long trains hurry after her flowing robes, their chimneys throwing tatters of brown smoke back toward the harbors and shipping cranes of Boston and New York embedded at the far right of the canvas. On her forehead she wears a golden star, the Star of Empire, and beneath it her blue eyes stare confidently ahead, unblinking into the darkness. My angel was like that except she was drifting over Los Angeles, or so I imagined as she passed over the foam green grid of tile, and she hadn’t come to guide me across the American frontier nor to illuminate the darkness—she’d come to take me toward it, far into the last frontier, or so I hoped as she stopped and stood before me and I saw clutched against her breast not a School Book but a syringe and a bag of clear fluid. Even if I hadn’t passed yet, it seemed we were making progress. A spool of cable hung in the crook of her arm, just as in the painting, where it always seemed a bit suspicious to me. Of course, the angel, Columbia, carries not a length of IV tubing but telegraph wire which, in the painting, she proceeds to wrap tight around the planet. But something about the combination of that coil and the fixity of the gaze—her face the very picture of certainty and unconcern—always unsettled me. Even in eighth grade in Mrs. Carey’s class, in the twenty minutes we were supposed to write an essay about American Progress while she played an Enya CD on her boombox, I thought the angel looked wickedly nonchalant, maybe somewhat like my father’s wife, a woman active in the church and in other’s affairs but no doubt self-effacing, always ready to lend a hand for the greater good, or an arm if needed, and while her delicate complexion often kept her indoors and out of light, a deep devotion to the holy ghost compelled her out invariably each Sunday, and doubtless if she could have had her way there would have been other days she ventured out as well, festive afternoons belonging to an earlier era when she would have insisted on carrying the rope in the crook of her arm—so devoted a servant was she—particularly if it were meant for me, her cheating husband’s bastard progeny. But my angel did not appear to revel in her work. She stood beside the bed peering past me out into the darkness. The moonlight clung along the edge of her contact lenses, a slight ridge of silver glinting over the whites of her eyes, which looked bloodshot, I thought, as though she’d been crying recently, and I remember thinking I could cheer her up, wanting to remind her—myself as well—of the poetry, how perfect it was that the position plotted for me, the final coordinates I felt myself now rapidly nearing, how divine that they converged on Dead Man’s Island. None of this was her fault. It was all written somewhere prior. Perhaps in one of those tattered old paperbacks my father brought over one night when I was nine and he said he wanted to see me read more. “It was always a solemn and interesting spot to me,” the Boston-born sailor Richard Henry Dana wrote of Dead Man’s Island in his classic travelogue Two Years Below the Mast, published in 1835. “There it stood, desolate and in the midst of desolation; and there were the remains of one who died and was buried alone and friendless. It was the only thing in California from which I could ever extract anything like poetry.”

“Feeling any better?” 

“Kill me.” 

Uncoiling the plastic tube, the nurse switched on the bedside lamp and hung the bag on the IV pole behind me.  

“You seem better… although your face continues to swell.” 

“Kill me,” I tried again, but whatever words I tried to form fell limp inside my mouth, dropping like wooden puppets, useless playthings snipped from knotted strings.

“Here. Let’s try this.” 

The nurse lifted the sheets and loosened the bed’s restraint belt. 

“Does that help?” she said.   

In a way, I was simply returning to my roots that night. I am a Southern California native after all, and I could not help but find it fitting that I’d ended up in an asylum on Terminal Island. There was a time, of course, when Southern California really was ‘an island on the land,’ in Carey McWilliams’s famous phrase, a place so isolated and unknown that for most Americans it was still “as much out of the world as though it were in the Sandwich Islands,” as Charles Nordhoff himself wrote in 1872 in California: For Health, Pleasure, and Residence, printed the same year John Gast completed the painting American Progress (and Samuel Butler wrote Erewhon). Most Americans had never even heard of Los Angeles until the year prior, in 1871, when the town for the first time graced the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. “Los Angeles or Los Diablos?” ran the headlines after a mob of hundreds beat, stabbed, and lynched nineteen unarmed Chinese men and boys in a narrow alley off the old plaza known as Calle de Los Negros, or more commonly, Nig*** Alley. Following the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, an endless caravan of bodies and ambition began pouring into the north of the state giving rise to countless new institutions, communities, and industries. And yet for all the rapid ‘progress,’ four-hundred miles to the south, society and culture remained largely unchanged. No cranes loomed over any ports. No railroad spur touched Southern California’s shores. No university brought them light. Cattle continued to vastly outnumber people. The imbalance was so glaring that officials in Sacramento and San Francisco began to refer to the south sardonically as the “Cow Counties,” and many no doubt pondered the mental—not to mention racial—fitness of the Spanish-speaking Dons that lorded over the expansive ranchos the Spanish and later Mexican government once granted to ex-soldiers as a reward for their service. The ranchos ranged over a hundred to more than a million acres and many of them bore titles that still dot the landscape today with place names like El Escorpión, Malibu, Encino, Los Feliz, and San Pedro, names that often belonged to the Dons themselves, the wealthy self-styled ‘pure-blooded’ Spanish noblemen who owned nearly all of Southern California’s arable and pasture land and yet—in a practice seemingly bovine-brained, or at least incompatible with the Protestant work ethic imported from the east—remained content to leave the land alone and simply let the cattle roam, such that across thousands of acres of fertile earth they often derived no income and made zero ‘improvements.’ Needless to say, population rose at tepid pace. Some weeks it even declined. In 1853 Los Angeles had more murders than any other town or city in America. A murder a day was reported in 1854, a horrifying homicide rate for any city but especially astounding for a town with only two-thousand people. “While I have been here in Los Angeles only two weeks, there have been it is said eleven deaths, and only one of them a natural death,” a traveling minister, Reverend James L. Woods, wrote that same year. “If I am to stay here,” he prayed, “may the lord be with me.” Unfortunately for Reverend Woods there was not then nor for years afterward a single church in Los Angeles. “Graded streets and sidewalks were unknown,” recalled Harris Newmark, who arrived in 1853. “So wretched indeed were the conditions, that I have seen dead animals left on the highways for days at a time, and can recall one instance of a horse dying on Alameda Street and lying there until a party of Indians cut up the carcass for food. What made these street conditions more trying was the fact that on hot days roads and sidewalks were devoid of shade…” Such conditions prompted many newcomers like Newmark to wonder if the city, named after the Virgin Mary, queen of the Angels, was not secretly dedicated to Satan, and indeed some must have looked east to the brown hills wobbling in the heat haze and seen their rocky peaks ringed with the swords of yucca fronds, the lower slopes glittering with gardens of red and yellow needles, dense stands of cholla and barrel cacti that gave cover to nesting rattlesnakes, and wondered, as the turkey vultures tilted in and out of the sun’s molten glare, if the entrance to Hell did not lay not on some shady knoll close to Rome, as Dante claimed in his Inferno, but actually somewhere close by—perhaps on a parched hillside just north of Los Angeles (the Santa Susana Field Laboratory?). Fittingly, non-Spanish speakers at the time called the town simply Los, a word that on the Anglo tongue would and still does sound like “Loss,” which was about what most people had come to expect of the region. And yet the gains were really the source of SoCal’s woes. For as millions of cows marched north to feed the mouths of Gold Rush miners, an incredible amount of cash trickled down toward the pockets of the Dons, at least in theory. In practice much of it did not always make home, and even when it did… “Fifty to sixty murders per year have been common here in Los Angeles,” another early visitor, an agricultural surveyor named William H. Brewer, wrote in 1860, “and some think it odd that there has been no violent deaths during the two weeks that we have been here.” Such a reputation did little to lure new settlers. The droughts that followed throughout the 1860s did not help either. Neither did the stench of 30,000 cows rotting in the fields. With the cattle industry teetering on the verge of collapse, an 1874 law requiring all rancho lands be fenced dealt the Dons their final blow. There was then not existent on earth a quantity of barbed wire sufficient to wrap such vast holdings, and if there had been the barbed wire would mostly have guarded bones. “Our inheritance is turned to strangers—our houses to aliens,” the famous Don, Señor Juan Bandini, lamented of the coming end. “We have drunken our water for money—our wood is sold unto us. Our necks are under persecution—we labor and have no rest.” Bandini did not exaggerate. Zero assistance came from the state capital and the vast rancho lands were sold and subdivided. Only the place names remained. It was not until 1882, over three decades after California entered the union, that officials in Sacramento finally deigned to grant the Cow Counties of Southern California their very first state-funded institution. 

It was not an opera house they supplied, nor a poor house, or a university. 

It was an insane asylum. 

“Are you done looking back?” the nurse said.

She stuck the tip of the plastic tube into the IV. Liquid began to flow from the bag, sluicing through the tube before it slowed into the vein in my arm.

“Nothing more… behind you?” she said. 

I tried to nod.  

The nurse stuck the tip of a syringe into a clear vial and pulled the plunger back.  

“The doctor says you should rest.”

I stared up at the moon and tried to picture the rocks and stones and roots below me, the cold soil where the nameless dead man had once laid alone and friendless for so many years. The Boston sailor, Richard Dana, had thought him an English sea captain poisoned by his crew. 

“Nothing more behind you,” the nurse whispered once more.   

No, I thought. Nothing more behind me. It’s time to move forward. Onward toward the darkness. Time to make Progress… Out the window to my right, an enormous black shadow was advancing through the night. A row of cranes vanished as it passed before them. I remember wondering if Christina had anything arriving on that barge, what she might have ordered online recently. Probably glucosamine and cat food. Maybe one of those fancy Rabbit vibrators. If Los Angeles had a real river, some of those ships might have continued inland that night. They could have docked not very far from Christina’s front door—assuming she still lived there—in the brick apartment we used to share on the east side of town near the old Los Feliz rancho where the river today flanks the Autry Museum of the West. The ships could have continued upstream through the Glendale Narrows to the San Fernando Valley, where she was born and raised, and further on toward the river’s headwaters in the Santa Susana Mountains, renowned for their alien topography, the red bluffs of amorphous sandstone heaped across miles of rugged highlands that have supplied a plausible Martian backdrop to countless science fiction B-movies like The Creeping Terror—rated 2.1/10 on IMDB—and plenty of passable TV such as Star Trek, a perennial favorite of my stepfather. Inspired by the otherworldly rocks and their remote location, numerous cults have taken up residence in the mountains among the river’s headwaters over the years, the most notable being the Manson Family, who, following Charles Manson’s release from Federal Correctional Institute Terminal Island in 1966 for trying to cash a forged $43 check, relocated to the Santa Susanas at Spahn Ranch where they continued to live during the Tate-Bianca murders. 

But it was never a real river. Never a navigable river. 

Terminal Island

That barge I saw that night drifting before the cranes, I knew it had to stop soon. And it would have to stop here. At Terminal Island. Where the Los Angeles River terminates at the Pacific Ocean in San Pedro harbor, the largest port facility in the western hemisphere. Seen on a map, or perhaps through the porthole of a Boeing 747 headed for Hawaii, the island looks like a monolithic trigger clamp moored just off the coast of Los Angeles. The jagged mechanical outlines speak to the fact that the island, like so much of the city, is artificial, manufactured, the product not of mother nature but of monstrous human will. A much better site for a massive Southern California port might have been the naturally protected deep water harbor a hundred miles south in San Diego at Coronado Bay. But the rising oligarchy of nineteenth century Los Angeles could not tolerate any competitors. As one influential Angeleno, a railroad man named C.W. Smith, proclaimed a generation prior after multiple rail lines finally reached the city in 1886: “Los Angeles cannot be retarded in her development. She is and must be the center of all things in Southern California for all time to come.” Perhaps it is no accident that Terminal Island resembles a gargantuan clamp since it was the island and its giant port complex that finally, after the completion of the aqueduct, solidified Los Angeles’s iron grip over the region. The construction of the artificial harbor commenced in 1928 with the removal of coffins and bones from Dead Man’s Island. Demolition followed. Perhaps any island so named was never destined to endure. Crews consumed twenty train car loads of dynamite reducing it to rubble before piling its roots and stones a few hundred feet away at the mouth of the river on a barren mudflat known as Rattlesnake Island, which makes me think: Prior to the construction of the harbor, in the winter months when the first rains washed off the mountains and flooded the dry arroyos, it appears that the Los Angeles River did actually become navigable, at least for one miserable creature, a poisonous reptile whom residents along the outskirts of the old San Pedro rancho often discovered alive and slithering and deposited in such abundance among the barren mudflat that they felt compelled to name the waste in its honor. 

Rattlesnake Island… Dead Man’s Island… Terminal Island… 

A fine place to watch one’s spark finally flicker out.  

The nurse inserted the tip of the syringe into the tube in my arm and pushed the plunger down.

“Yes, my angel,” I said. “Sink your venom into me.” 

Together Dead Man’s Island and Rattlesnake Island formed Terminal Island, at the very western tip of which stood a federal prison, and within it, at the far end of the old asylum wing, there lay alone that night a piece of cargo ready for export.

“Ship me off into eternal night. Draw the bridge. Raise the sails. I await the voyage... A Billion Years Beneath the Mast. Dispatch me to oblivion.” But the nurse did not hear me and she did not comply. And for that I guess I’m grateful. I keep thinking of a line I read online recently from Alan Watts. “By all outward appearances our life is a spark of light between one eternal darkness and another.” How fragile, infinitesimal, and fleeting are our lives, and so too the things they illuminate, the rocks and trees and rivers that we are given to perceive, however briefly. What a shame to waste the chance to see. Even more shameful when I think of all the barges and cranes and the shipping containers stacked on trains and semi-trucks and the fossil fuels burned between them that have, over the course of thirty-one years, collectively labored to keep my shabby spark alive. I keep thinking, too, maybe that primal spark was the secret to Blakelock’s painting…