What Am I to a Fly?

Oxnard, California

I spent last night parked just meters from the Pacific Ocean where I now sit, the morning water calm, a great sea gently coaxing waves onto shore, one after another after another. Coots and cormorants bobble behind the break, willets wander the water’s edge, and gulls hover overhead. Dotted they are like scattered freckles across the glorious nose of this shapeshifting shore. A thick, milky fog drapes over the bluffs to the east. Everywhere in view is evidence that movement whispers across all of time.

Inside this vanhome, a dozen flies or more busily attempt to find their way out, flanking the edges of windows and windshield as if they know they might luck upon an escape. (How do they know about such things?) Yet, they refuse what escape hatches I offer and just as surely my efforts to shoo them out. They rushed in yesterday as I flung open the side door while packing up to leave Salton Sea, a landlocked sea about two hours south of Death Valley.

In 1905, a flooding Colorado River jump…