After The Mudslide

A Husband's Life Is Turned Upside-down When He’s Forced to Join a Vanpool

If Craig Toledo, thirty-nine-year-old married father of two, stood on the northeast corner of his front porch and tilted his head twenty degrees, he could see his nondescript office building in the distance.

Craig had deliberately bought the house for its proximity to Glenson Dynamics, a SoCal defense contractor which had recently wowed Navy brass with the development of the world’s first biodegradable surface-to-air missile. He figured a seven-minute commute would free up valuable time to do meaningful things with his life.

On this front, Craig Toledo had largely failed.

On Monday evenings, Craig served as a Den Leader in eight-year-old Jameson’s local Cub Scout troop. Craig had been stabbed three times by wayward pocket knives and set on fire twice—once by Jameson himself—but it was worth it to see the pride on his son’s face when he achieved new milestones, like peeing on an anthill or spitting off a bridge.

On Tuesdays and Saturdays, Craig coached six-year-old Maude’s t-ball team. Maude had no athletic instincts whatsoever which was fine because neither did anyone else on her team. The bulk of the season was split between trying in vain to explain the rules of baseball and being harassed by wealthier parents in the team group chat after he naively suggested a $20 spending cap on postgame snack bags.

The abuse by the scouts and t-ball parents necessitated Craig’s Wednesday evening therapy session, which he was able to squeeze in before speeding back to the house so wife Lindsey could make it to her weekly Girls Night Out. Sometimes she and her friends went to dinner and a movie. Some nights they went to a club and danced. Some weeks Lindsey didn’t come home until well after midnight and slept till ten, which was fine because Craig’s short commute made it possible for him to rouse the kids, get them dressed, and make it to the bus stop with just enough time left over for Craig to shower, shave, and be on his way.

But all that changed after the mudslide.

Craig had heard the rain pounding on Jameson’s window the night before—Jameson needed white noise sounds to fall asleep but didn’t like white noise machines which meant Craig spent an hour every evening lying on his third grader’s bedroom floor making “whoosh whoosh” sounds—but the full impact of the previous night’s downpour did not register until Craig came to an abrupt stop in front of a fifteen-foot impassable wall of dirt on the southern end of Highway 150.

Within minutes, Craig was joined by co-workers, including his quarter-zip-sweater-wearing boss Byron, who took one glance at the mud mountain and declared, “I’m going golfing.”

By five p.m., Glenson sent a company wide email acknowledging the problem and armed with a solution:

Starting tomorrow, all Glenson employees impacted by the landslide can park at the road closure and board a company-issued van which will shuttle them to and from Glenson via California State Route 126, the 101 Freeway, Route 33, and Highway 150. Please see attached map.

A good employee, Craig studied the map, and calculated what this detour meant: his seven-minute commute was now a sixty-minute commute.

Each way.

Craig didn’t have an extra hundred and twenty minutes to spare. There were Cub Scouts and t-ballers and night club owners depending on him. There were “whoosh whoosh” sounds to make that only he could “whoosh whoosh.”

Craig ventured to the mudslide as darkness fell and asked a sheriff if he might be allowed to hike over the landslide to work the next morning, a maneuver he calculated would buy him forty more minutes each way. “I should add that I am a fully trained scout leader and own quality hiking boots,” he said.

The sheriff shook his head. “Dirt’s still moving. You climb on there, you might get swallowed up.”

Craig stared up at the towering mix of dirt and rock.

Swallowed up?

He wondered what it would feel like to be swallowed. To be churned into a million pieces. He wondered if anyone would even try to find him. Or whether he’d be forgotten for a few million years until an archaeologist from another time and place pierced the ground with the tip of his shovel and hit something hard. And when he was found, if they could identify him. If they could tell right away they had uncovered a 21st century man, curled in the fetal position, gripping an iPhone and paralyzed by the fear of a thousand imaginary monsters.

“I guess I’ll just… take the van,” he concluded.

At seven a.m. the next morning, Craig boarded the twelve-seat Ford Econoline. A few other co-workers were already there and silently scrolling. He joined them briefly but his heart wasn’t in it. He couldn’t shake the previous night’s vision. The fear of being swallowed. Of becoming a fossil lost to time.

In the bleakness of it all, Craig sensed an impulse.

A calling.

A small voice telling him to open his laptop. To set his hands on the keyboard and wait, as if his Dell XPS 16 possessed the processing power to connect him to something… divine.

The van hit a pothole and Craig’s right thumb bumped the trackpad, clicking open a piece of pre-loaded software that engineers typically avoid.

MS Word.

He stared at the empty white page. The cursor pulsed rhythmically. A heartbeat.

“Whatcha working on, Craigers?” his boss Byron asked from across the aisle.

Before Craig could think, he blurted out an answer.

“I’m writing a novel,” he said.

“A novel?!” Byron laughed.

In Byron’s defense, there was no evidence Craig had much to say. His communications on the office Slack channel were friendly but brief and robotic. He seemed no more capable of eliciting emotion with words than a soft stick of unsalted butter.

Yet, in all truth, Craig had been thinking about an idea. For years. Bits of the plot would pop into his brain in the rare moments he gave his mind space to let his thoughts wander, grabbing his attention the way one spots a flash of lightning through clouds, only for the notion to be pushed aside by a stab from a Cub Scout pocket knife or a slam of t-ball bat to the crotch or a buzz on his phone from LinkedIn, imploring him to congratulate a friend on their recent work anniversary.

“What’s it about?” Byron asked.

“Well,” Craig said, tapping into a decade of half-thoughts suddenly fused together. “It’s a futuristic sci-fi novel that takes place eight hundred miles beneath the Earth’s crust in a world populated by highly resilient humanoids who have evolved in a post-apocalyptic world to withstand intense heat and geologic forces. They survive off a heavy metal diet and have fingernails so strong they can tunnel through anything, thus allowing them to construct highly technical subterranean cities. And everything is fine until one of them discovers an old volcanic fissure, a passageway to the surface. And so the novel follows the first group of explorers, led by our unlikely hero CT1, as he returns to the paradise of Earth twelve million years after its nuclear destruction.”

Bryon sat with the synopsis for a good ten seconds, then:

“Damn. That’s some good shit.”

Was it? Craig wasn’t sure. But he put his head down and started typing.

He admittedly didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t understand character arcs. He overused cliches. He stole dialogue from his favorite films. His grammar was abysmal.

It also didn’t matter. He was simply creating something and trying to make it as good as a mechanical engineer with a speciality in environmentally-friendly weapon deployment could make it. And with each page, he improved. Every time he finished a new chapter, he would go back to the beginning and rewrite the ones that came before.

With every commute, Craig Toledo became more alive. He started feeling feelings he didn’t know he had. Twice in the first week, co-workers would look over and see Craig weeping as he typed. Not unlike his protagonist CT1, Craig was rising from a dark place and seeing forgotten things in a completely new light.

“I think we should quit t-ball,” he announced a few weeks after the mudslide. “I mean, Maude has no talent and she hates it and the parents are toxic.”

Lindsey agreed.

“And another thing,” he said a few days after that. “I like the idea of scouts and God knows Jameson needs an outlet for his energy, but it feels like I’m just babysitting other people’s brats and maybe he and I would have more quality time if we just went camping as a family and found our own bridges to spit off and anthills to pee on.”

Lindsey thought that sounded fun.

“Also, enough with his white noise crap,” he added. “That kid is playing me. Jameson can fall asleep in silence like every other child has somehow managed to do since the dawn of time.”

Lindsey chuckled. “Fair,” she said.

“Oh, and about Wednesday nights,” he added. “I love that you have friends and I like that you go out but it’s weird that you go out with them more than we go out with each other. But I’m not blaming you. That’s on me for not being the type of husband you’d even want to go out with and I need to change that. And yes, going out means we have to spend money on a babysitter and with two kids it won’t be cheap but it’ll be a lot cheaper than a divorce and our dates don’t even have to be fancy for all I care. That Chinese place gives a discount to Glenson employees and my car is full of Subway coupons and so maybe one night a week we get a six-inch sub and a side of chow mein and go sit at the park with a bottle of wine and a Trader Joe’s candle and try to remember why we like each other.”

Lindsey smiled. “I’ll be there,” she said.

Six weeks later, Craig and Lindsey were on their fourth candle, Maude had completely forgotten about t-ball, Jameson was sleeping like a baby, and Craig’s novel was hurtling toward a climax. He pulled into his normal parking spot along the mudslide, excited to spend the morning vanpool in search of a fitting ending, when he looked up to see…

THE ROAD WAS OPEN.

A stream of cars passed happily north and south, walls of dirt pushed aside overnight by a team of backhoes and bulldozers now lining Highway 150.

“You’re kidding,” Craig muttered.

He found a foreman in a high-res vest drinking a Big Gulp.

“What happened? This wasn’t supposed to be cleared till June.”

The foreman shrugged. “The suits at Glenson got antsy,” he said. “Said opening this road was ‘an issue of national security’ or some bullshit. I don’t know what they do up there but they got someone at the DOD to call the city supervisor and, well, heigh-ho heigh-ho…”

“Huh.” Craig nodded a few times to himself. “Great.”

But it wasn’t great. It was not great at all.

Craig tried to write during his lunch break but a stream of work emails made it impossible. He tried to squeeze in some writing time after dinner but the kids were screaming and Lindsey was drained and he could sense any progress he had made over the previous two months to reorder his life and save his marriage was slipping away.

He needed more time.

Ten days tops.

Just long enough for CT1 to track down a leftover nuclear weapon from the Before Time and drop it into the volcanic fissure before the rest of the humanoids joined him on the surface and ravaged the utopia he had built with his cyborg wife.

“Is it okay if I stay late tonight?” he asked Lindsey over breakfast the next morning.

“Stay as long as you need,” she said.

“Thank you.” He kissed her on the forehead and grabbed his car keys.

She didn’t notice he was wearing his hiking boots.

Craig returned home just before 1 in the morning. He stopped on the northeast corner of his front porch, tilted his head twenty degrees, and pressed a button on his laptop. A second later, a small tremor shook the ground just south of Glenson Dynamics. It wasn’t strong enough to wake Lindsey or Jameson or Maude.

But it was enough to put a smile on Craig Toledo’s face.