Playing in the Apocalypse

What would it take to push Kate out of her student apartment and into the tear-gas-saturated night to build barricades to block the armored dump trucks full of police officers with rifles? Kate and Joel were university students in 1970, when the Vietnam war protests were at their height. Drawn from the author’s own experiences during her senior year, a tender love story unfolds, set during the Isla Vista riots amidst martial law and escalating violence. Joel would evade the police and steal into Isla Vista every Friday night, risking arrest, or worse, to be with Kate for one more weekend. He was her hero, and he called it “playing in the apocalypse.”

It was 1970. Kate and Joel were lovers during the riots in Isla Vista, a once sleepy, palm-studed, beachfront student community next to the University of California, Santa Barbara campus. For Kate, raised by repressive fundamentalist Christian parents, Isla Vista was the first place in her life that felt like home. She loved to browse the bookstore and take long walks along the beach. There were concerts and street dances just about every weekend… and then her world came apart. Kate’s apartment was right on the police patrol loop, where armored trucks full of cops shot the tires of parked cars and lobbed tear gas canisters at the apartment buildings. She and her roommate barricaded the door and hid until something happened that galvanized them into action. In between the fires, the rage, and the night the bank went up in flames, a tender love story unfolded between Joel and Kate. It was a terrifying and life-changing year. Packed with details and drawn from the author’s own experiences, “Playing in the Apocalypse" is a time capsule of a scary, but in many ways simpler, era.

Kate Comings received a B.A. in English from University of California, Santa Barbara. She has been a single mom and is a retired medical transcriptionist. An enthusiastic amateur photographer, she writes almost every day and and is working on a series of novels set in Portland, Oregon. She lives in Northeast Portland, Oregon with two dogs.