Desperation Reef

“The gods have nothing to do with it,” says Brock, who does not believe that a god — and certainly not some cabal of them — in any way intervenes on behalf of the human beings of Earth. He’s always berating his brother for Casey’s self-promoting, Christian notions of divine intervention through prayer. Much better in Brock’s mind is Mahina’s worship of nature — gods who openly help and sometimes destroy their mortals.

The Breath of Life is what Brock would pray to if he prayed at all.

Instead, he worships actions, forged by the heat of the real.

Forged in the absolute belief that people can change the world.

You can just watch, Brock says in his “sermons.” Or you can act. Join the battle.

That’s the foundation of the Breath of Life Rescue Mission, and of every angry sermon and call to action that Brock has issued from his pulpit on the Aguanga compound over the last year. And ranted from his media platforms.

God(s) or not, in Brock’s mind, the Red Cross simply made it to Ukiah because they made it to Ukiah, and — with typical NGO caution — wouldn’t risk getting close enough to the danger to give away their ample supplies of water, food, clothing, blankets, diapers, pet food, battery-powered lanterns, generators, coffee and coffee makers, generators, motel vouchers, and, oddly, twelve pallets of canned beets! There are twenty-four twelve-ounce cans per plastic-wrapped bundle. Though none have pull tops, and not one manual can opener is in sight.

Which is the kind of thing that drives Brock Stonebreaker crazy — always has — when people get ninety percent of the job done but don’t close it off with the final ten. Then blame it on a god’s will, or a rule or a law, or a forecast, or a tarot reading, or global fucking warming.

Which is why he created the Go Dogs, and why he only accepts people who will not hesitate to go that last ten percent, or more, to get it done. And called them the Go Dogs because a dog understands that last ten percent without ever being taught it, or even bothering to think about it.

You see. You go. You do it until it’s done.

You take off on that wave and you are committed.

On a huge wave, the last ten percent is fear. Brock dwells on that a lot in his rants. Fear is hesitation and hesitation is death on a sixty-foot wave.

Hell, thinks Brock: a twenty-foot wave. He saw a boyhood friend killed by a wicked-thick eighteen-foot demon at Sunset Beach on Oahu.

A friend.

Brock was a teenager himself then, and he’d gotten Glenn to shore as fast as he could and CPR’d him until the paramedics came running across the beach with their boxes and stretcher, and they let Brock ride in the back of the truck to the hospital under colors and a loudly optimistic siren.

Brock had prayed to God in that bumpy, wailing truck, just like his grandpa — Pastor Mike Stonebreaker — had taught him to.

Pressing his forehead to Glenn’s bouncing chest, praying hard and clear and rationally, offering all he had, making a hundred promises if He would just keep Glenn’s heart beating.

Well, He didn’t.

Which is another reason Brock created the Go Dogs within his Breath of Life Rescue Mission. To help people who are too bad off to help themselves.

Brock wasn’t going to be fooled twice.

By 2 A.M., the Go Dogs have given up every last water bottle, food stuff, bar of soap, tube of toothpaste, and family-sized tent — thirty of them — donated by a Go Dogs friend who owns a chain of outdoor/camping/fishing/hunting stores in Costa Mesa. The tents are high quality and expensive, waterproof, fire resistant, and quick to set up.

Now — just after two in the morning — Brock helps a family of five drive the final stakes into the soccer stadium grass. Mahina circles them, shooting video for the Go Dogs website and Brock’s social media, to which he posts with great volume and profanity. Mahina writes some of the less heated dispatches under the Brock Stonebreaker/Go Dogs handle.

The tent-building dad drives his last spike with an angry swing; his wife sits on the ground with her back to the tent, wrapped in a clean new blanket, nursing her baby.

Exhausted Brock sits on his butt beside Mahina and they look out through the drifting smoke to the hills sparking in the near distance, and to the mountains farther out glowing red with flames and rocketing embers. He’s been up for thirty-six hours. His eyes are burning but looking out to the little village of tents pitched on the soccer field, he feels his heart beating steady and strong.

6

Two hours later they make Ukiah, where they load the ash-encrusted Go Dogs Econoline with more Red Cross survival provisions, and find gas.

Mahina squeegees the filthy windshield while Brock tries to post a call for reinforcements on his heavily attended socials. His phone has only two bars out here, but he writes anyway, his orders as separate posts, like bullets: