Jacob Simmons
Jacob Simmons
Jacob Simmons is an MFA candidate at Fresno State. He writes about things that go in jars and people named John and space and elephants. His work can be read in Under the Sun magazine and the New Limestone Review. He is a 2024 Pushcart nominee and he teaches high school English in California’s Central Valley.
Five-Legged Spider
In 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Honshu, Japan. Over four thousand nautical miles away from Japan is the Monterey Peninsula in California, where I lived when the disaster unfolded in Okuma.
I was the General Manager of a hardware sales business in Salinas. My “territory” gave me the opportunity to see the inner workings, the guts of myriad facilities. I stocked nuts and bolts for global salad players and Richard MacDonald’s art studio. Pebble Beach Golf Club and Cal State Monterey. Go Otters! The Language Institute and the Naval Postgraduate School. I was the man, for a while anyway, who sold toilet paper, batteries, hard hats, road cones, packing tape, cut-resistant gloves, safety glasses, concrete-anchors, lettuce knives, aprons, and urinal cakes to folks working in the agricultural and industrial corners of the peninsula.
Business boomed in 2011. Sales were running thirty percent higher than the year before, and I was making a bunch of money off strategic weapons contractors for the military (materials classified). General Managing: Keep a close eye on profit margins and accounts who let their bills drift out beyond forty days. Make collection calls. Drive a forklift and load pallets of penny nails on a flatbed diesel truck. Bust knuckles in plumbing shops popping boxes of pipe nipples in a careless rush with a clenched fist. Hire people and fire people.
The shop ran like a striped-ass ape. Corporate layers of district, regional, and national bosses were happy with my production, so I kept a little secret from them: my real, actual working hours in a given week hovered around twenty, leaving a lot of time left to drive around and look at the ocean. At the rocks north of Asilomar. At the butterflies and the pink flowers. Time to cruise and listen to John Prine on K-PIG in paradise. 107.5 FM. I was inspired, so I’d spend chunks of the work day in my little apartment, too, writing music. Waltzes about Texas towns I’d never seen, about Carolina, and Morocco. Ditches, dancing, and London. Nashville and nightmares. Character songs. Fictions and two and a half minute confessions in three-quarter time.
On the day the earth slipped below Japan, and a tidal wave decimated its shores, local and national media warned of residual surges making their way across the ocean to slam into America’s west coast. I fielded calls from concerned family members and friends who were making sure I’d heard the warnings. That I knew what to do if the ocean walloped my neighborhood. KSBW, the local news station covering Santa Cruz, Monterey, and Salinas, sent a fleet of reporters out to beaches and piers and marinas to cover the impending destruction. I watched the action on the couch in my studio, safely, high above the surf. Glued to live updates on the “surge situation” along the central coast.
Should the wave come, stay off the beaches.
Don’t be reckless.
The big question is: How will YOU survive?
Don’t go to look.
We’re watching everything for you.
Keep it right here for the news you need to know.
Let’s all hope for the best.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium sits at the water line at the start, or the end of Cannery Row, depending on which way you’re going. It marks the border line separating Pacific Grove and Monterey proper, and it’s about two-hundred yards downhill from my place on PG’s 1st St. I sold PVC ball valves to the aquarium’s maintenance department and made deliveries early in the morning before it opened. At least three times a week, I got to wander the aquarium alone. A singular, tattooed memory: see the seahorses and jellyfish and the swirling motion of sardines racing each other to nowhere forever. I watched the news and worried about the aquarium, and the surge, and losing such marvelous access to brown and red and silver life. Blue-green life. Iridescence. Radiance.
A reporter in a slicker stood at the entrance to the Old Fisherman’s Wharf. The cameraperson fixed an expensive lens on a flock of seagulls walking and pecking shrimp tails, scraps from the pier’s wooden planks. Seals barked. A man working for the city threw cardboard into a truck crawling by candy shops and pirates. I remember the reporter said something like, “Obviously, the City of Monterey isn’t taking the surge warning as seriously as they should. Employees are still out here doing their jobs and you really have to wonder, is today the right day for recycling? Jason Jasonson–KSBW News.” The anchor chimes in with a, “Thank you, Jason. Stay safe.”
The anchor says something along the lines of, “We take you now, live, forty miles up the coast to Christy Christensen where the rise in tide has unmoored a boat in Santa Cruz Harbor. Christy, what can you tell us?” The camera is fixed on a boat drifting gently beside the docks.
“Well, I’m here in Santa Cruz and you can see we’re bringing you live coverage of a boat that’s adrift in the harbor. It’s being pushed by the tide out to sea. We’re told that nobody is aboard, but we do expect some sort of impact. Obviously, this is an active situation.”
The craft, in tranquil meandering, glimmers as Christy “Oohfs!” when it gets close enough to nudge another vessel. She talks about what a boat like this costs.
“Some of these can go for three to four–Lookout!”
The boat has a near miss. The camera stays with it, riveting the audience as we watch and wait for disaster. I will not say hope, though the reporter’s tone suggests she’s rooting.
“That was a close one, but as I said, it’s an active situa–Ohp! Ohp! Look, look, look! Our viewers can see it’s headed straight for those rocks at the mouth of the harbor!”
We certainly can.
“Ohp! Ohp!”
Another miss and the boat is clear, unscathed, out to sea.
“Well, there it goes,” says KSBW’s dispirited reporter.
Twenty seconds of dead air follow. Someone’s expensive boat floats under California’s golden sun and fills my tv screen. KSBW’s camera captured the Coast Guard towing the watersport splurge back safely into harbor, and I watched as coasties tied it to the dock with a cleat hitch. Episode over. This isn’t to say there was no damage to Santa Cruz’ harbor. Some destruction, sure. Some oceanic mayhem in the form of moderate currents and mildly rising tides.
While I worried about marine life in California, tens of thousands of people were dead or dying in Japan. Footage showed fires breaking out on top of the wreckage-water moving through farms and across highways, oozing over land like wet cement. Residents in Miyako City filmed ships capsizing. “Black water is coming towards us,” they said. Some people rode bicycles along paths next to churning rivers of salt water and houses. They were swallowed. Many folks were ripped apart. Much was destroyed.
A dejected reporter dangles his legs off a pier on the wharf in Monterey. The sun is setting and none of his reporting will go viral. No live shots will be picked up by the national media because disaster didn’t come when he was ready for it. The “surge situation” let him down. Everyone survived. He’d conducted no interviews with panicked peninsulares who’d ran for their lives and cried on camera about washed away homes. “Grandkid” memories, nostalgic spaces were still intact. He talks to the ocean in his moment of sorrow. He asks why it didn’t help him make more compelling coverage.
“Because,” says the ocean. “I am tired.”
The indignant reporter shouts, “How can you be too tired to knock a few boats on their asses? To crash into the aquarium’s walls, blow them out and free the penguins? To drown a few divers? To rage like you raged elsewhere? To make me a slicker-wearing star? To rocket me iconic? To bring me the eyes of the world?”
“You were not prepared,” says the ocean.
“We sent out the KSBW helicopter though,” bellyaches the reporter.
“Fear not,” says the ocean. “Someday, you will have your disaster.”
“When?” asks the morose reporter.
“The day you stop looking for one,” says the ocean.
Am I like such a fellow? Traveling the American south to see racist statues and assault weapons. Headstones of the famous dead. Martyrdom and memorials to the unknown. Writing about the worst of us, the meanest, the dumbest. And am I the reporter dangling his legs over history and the infinite abyss of tomorrow, dejected because I will not see the hurt I planned to see? The most vivid cruelty and most unconcealed ugliness that was to be my spectacle is allusive still. I did not hear the screamed words of screamers and shout back any meaningful truth to power. I did not bleed for a worthy cause. I’m finished, having missed my shot to stop a disaster. To do something more than point and tell anyone who’ll listen, “What a mess. What a loss. What a shame.”
It strikes me that human disasters are natural disasters, as natural as a wildfire or an EF5 tornado. If we crawled from the ocean all those years ago, and found ourselves fit enough, adapted enough to one day be naturally selected to survive, then nothing a human being does is against our collective nature. The sweet things we do. The wretched, too. The wandering tourism through suffering all over. Looking, bearing witness to a disaster not our own.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2011 earthquake, a tsunami compromised nuclear reactors’ cooling systems at the Fukushima-Dai-ichi plant. A meltdown released radioactive material into the environment, enough to give everyone on earth the radiation equivalent of an x-ray that day. Fourteen years later, the land around Fukushima, 230 square miles of Japanese dirt, is too radioactive for human life.
We are not prepared, for now anyway, to adapt to a life of fallout and Geiger meters. Not like the wild boars that root and roam and reproduce with such vigor in the abandoned streets around Fukushima. Not like the fish that feed along the Arakawa River’s nuclear banks. Monkeys thrive there. As do spiders with eight legs who swirl, who spiral. See the eight-legged spider move like the wheels of the Crocodile spinning toward something beautiful.
Some of the spiders in the fallout zone have only five legs (radiation sponsored mutation), and they work differently than the others. They move like a rolling pentagon with stops and stutters and leaps. Still, the forces of nature compel the five-legged spiders to create, to expel their silk with jagged asymmetry in forsaken forests. Masterpieces all, and because of evacuation orders, the Fukushima webs will remain until they’re destroyed by nature devoid of human hands.
The problem for us is when radiation is out of control. When we are unable to harness what we’ve let go. Radioactive material damages our DNA. It breaks our chromosomes. Our mutations come in the form of cancer cells when we’re exposed to untethered emissions. So it’s best to stay away from places like Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Bikini Atoll.
Radiation mushrooms sometimes in clouds of pink and green and orange. It travels through the atmosphere and makes us sick. Radiation is lied about, naturally, when it falls on families and other wildlife. Radiation is used to threaten, to frighten, to assure mutual destruction. Radiation unfurled is a disaster of human nature.
But controlled radiation is different. Controlled radiation can power the world with clean energy. The kind of energy that keeps the sky blue and the lights on for all of us. The kind of energy that keeps us warm and cools us down. Precise energy. The kind of high energy that targets our sickness and kills the cells that try to take life and ruin it. Life that holds my hand in 2011 and walks from Fisherman’s Wharf to Cannery Row. Life that says, “Carry me, uncle.” Life that says, “Please!” Life that wears a little purple coat in the Monterey Aquarium and marvels at the scuba divers waving to her behind the kelp exhibit’s glass. “Uncle, I want to do that,” she says. Life that wraps her arms around my neck when we walk home, up the steep hill to the old apartment in Pacific Grove. Life that holds on tight. Life that sleeps. That dreams, and dreams, and dreams.
I should’ve studied radiochemistry and nuclear physics when I was young instead of hocking urinal pucks to lettuce growers. I think these sciences are reserved for remarkable minds. Minds that can make sense of alpha particles and atomic nuclei. Invasive cyclotrons. Critical mass. The mathematics of the universe. I should’ve studied genetics so I could parse inherited from sporadic mutations and bring molecular building blocks to the forefront of my thesis. Fix dangerous DNA trends regarding ribonucleic acid. I should’ve studied microbiology. Learned to put things under a microscope, know what I saw and what to do about it. What wasted years learning nothing but how to eyeball a metric or mil-spec carriage bolt from across the room. Learning what kinds of drives make it impossible for inmates to take screws out of their cell doors. Learning how to import industrial-use hair nets from China to shave costs and raise profits. Learning to shrink-wrap pallets and plasma tables. If I’d have studied science and medicine instead of when to use zinc or stainless steel locknuts, I’d have something more to offer than “Everything is going to be okay” to life that must be.
Life that today reminds me of the cryptic things the ocean says to those who look for disasters like I do. “Someday, you will have your disaster,” says the ocean. Not yet. No, not yet. Because radiation can cure her. And I haven’t stopped looking. That’s the deal, right? Disaster will be mine when I stop seeking other calamities.
I have no dirt from Pennsylvania, but I’ve got that trip all settled on paper. Figure I fly into Cleveland and rent a car. I can stay with my grandma for a night in Chippewa Lake, get Ohio dirt while I’m there. Then, I’ll cruise through Amish country and into Clairton, where The Deer Hunter was set, get some pictures and make my way to Middletown. I want to put eyes on the nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island, to visit the memorial site in the Pennsylvania woods and collect some radioactive dirt. Disasters abound. Cherokee, Navajo, Hopi. More still. People vaporized. Human beings on fire. Uranium. Fallout. Downwinders. I want to feel something radiate and make it my own. Run my fingers through it. Arrest it. Possess it. Put a lid on it and a piece of tape. Mark it: PA.