Week 17: On The Road Again
(or, the long strange trip through SoCal comes to an end)
…SEEING PLACES THAT I’VE NEVER BEEN
Oh, Willie. One of the things I really miss about Austin, Texas (the old Austin, the ‘Keep Austin Weird’ place, the place that, if you played music in the late nineties and wanted to move somewhere, you flipped a coin and either went to Austin or Portland, Austin, the place that put more bands on the map than you would ever believe, the place that you can just sort of catch the last vestigial ghosts of if you go right now, before the NEW Austin, the Elon and Rogan Austin, the ‘Mini LA’ Austin, the place that seems relentlessly determined to plow under any tiny bit of culture there is and build a four-story mixed use apartment box there) is that the closest thing that town had to a patron saint was Willie Nelson.
And if there’s anybody that deserves patron sainthood, it’s ol’ Willie. Well, maybe Dolly, but I’d argue she’s already achieved it. The one person in that can wholeheartedly unite the fractured soul of this nation: Miss Dolly Parton. Seriously! Find me somebody who will say something bad about Dolly Parton, and I’ll show you some zip ties and a black-site, and you’ll never hear from that person again.
What the fuck am I talking about? Jeez. (I actually considered keeping the ‘Old Austin vs New Austin run-on sentence going for the entire post, because I easily could, and the part of me that I shouldn’t listen to would think that’s funny, but my better angel prevailed. THIS TIME. Thank your gods.)
Anyways. You see that picture up there, the header? That was my home for JUST under three weeks. It was a huge flat dry lake-bed, surrounded by low mountains, and in my daily walks I explored just about every damn inch of it. I wouldn’t call it beautiful, exactly; parts of it certainly could be, if it weren’t for the people.
And I’m not even talking about the gun nuts! If you missed last week’s post, pretty much from dawn until well after dark, those mountains were a nonstop echoing cacophony of gun folks firing off every caliber imaginable. The tinny little pops of a nine millimeter, the meaty thunk of a Desert Eagle. The shotguns, that felt like somebody was smacking you in the back of the head. And the sniper rifles, which sounded… I mean, cool, man. Like a movie!
It was wild. It faded into the background, most of the time, which might sound odd but the one truth of human beings is that we can get used to anything- especially stuff we shouldn’t. I’m only two days away from the nonstop barrage, and I almost miss it a little.
Now I should say that I’m not against guns- I mean, what’s not to like? They’re friggin highly refined, meticulously constructed, wildly expensive machines that use EXPLOSIONS to make stuff a hundred yards away break! That’s cool as fuck, man. They’re fun to collect, they have their own mythos, and they’re just exotic enough to be fascinating. I totally understand gun nuts, in the same way I totally understand someone who collects rare action figures.
I also have a keystone memory of going out into the woods of Pennsylvania when I was young and spending a happy afternoon shooting bottles off the branches of a low tree- that’s just fun. So there was a part of me that would tip my Bass Pro Shops hat at the gun folks, and wish ‘em well.
NOW; do I think that everybody should be able to have every kind of gun humanly possible? Of course not. Do I think you should have to pass the same kinds of basic-level competency tests that you have to in order to drive an automobile? I don’t know how you make a good-faith argument against that. No, my problem with the gun folks wasn’t the guns, it was the fact that they don’t friggin’ clean up after themselves.
This dry lake bed- and the mountains surrounding it- were trashed. I don’t know how many years people have been dragging out tires, old appliances, furniture, water heaters, and shit I can’t recognize because it’s been torn into new shapes by bullet holes- but it’s gotta be a lot. Those hills were covered by old bullet-ridden trash, gun casings, and- inexplicably- the sun-shade tent things that they brought out there so they could shoot their little pop-pops and not have the hurty sun in their little eyesey-wiseys. And I can’t stress enough- this isn’t some remote corner of the desert- this is BLM land and a very active campsite about fifteen miles from one of the most famous national parks in the country.
Grrr. I’m still mad about it. Shoot your guns, assholes, but take your trash back with you.
Anyways. What were we talking about?
I JUST CAN’T WAIT TO GET ON THE ROAD AGAIN
Right, so, three weeks here. I did take a break halfway through, ran into Joshua Tree (the town, not the National Park) and did some laundry and re-stocked some supplies, but other than that, it was just me and the desert and the gun nuts.
It was a test, of sorts- If the WLBT is going to survive this little funding crisis, I’m going to be able to have to spend a bunch of time in places like this, and need to be able to go for up to a couple- even three- weeks without replenishing water, butane for the stove, coffee, and Chobani Greek Yogurt (the addiction is real). Also, go for weeks at a time without talking to, interacting with, or seeing other human beings! So this was a sort of ‘see-if-I-can-do-it’ kind of thing. And I’m happy to report that I saw, and apparently, I can.
Part of me, I’m somewhat horrified to report, kind of likes it.
HOWEVER, the goal is not to STOP the tour… Merely to slow down to the most inexpensive crawl possible. So, my ability to survive the various trials and travails of the desert proven sufficiently to myself, it was time to GTFO of this one.
There was one somewhat amusing aspect of my last week in this dry lake bed, and in thinking about whether or not to relate it here, I did an internal query and realized I DID NOT WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT IT… So, by the rules of the WLBT, I must.
It’s not that bad! Just funny. So, when I was originally setting out on this quote unquote adventure, I had a fair few fantasies and daydreams about what it was going to be like. You know some of those, if you have been here from the start- a nonstop barrage of book conventions, for one! Going to every bookstore I could find, for two! Eating regional street food and turning that into a hugely successful social media thing! Exploring every nook and cranny of every city I went through. ALL the coffeeshops. ALL the breweries.
I think we know how all of that is going, right? Sigh. But one of the other things I was daydreaming about was going to Vanlife meetups. This is basically where a whole bunch of RV’ers and Vanlifers all pick a place, usually somewhere far away from everything, and meet up for a weekend, a week, sometimes even a month. (If you want to know what I’m talking about, watch Nomadland, and also, it’s an incredible movie, just watch it already). I was definitely going to find out a few of those meetups (they happen mostly in the southwest in winter) and make some friends and have some fun and YEE HAW!
You see where this is going, right?
Anyways, the week of Thanksgiving, I started noticing an odd phenomenon- way over on the complete other side of the dry lake bed- almost too far to see- five or six vans and RV’s had clumped together. ‘Huh’, I thought, and then went back to my keyboard. But then within two days, this had grown to a sea of vehicles- I’d say maybe a hundred, maybe more, all clumped up into a little city. They put up string lights, started bonfires, and TURNED UP THE MUSIC. Then, starting on Thanksgiving eve, these fuckers really started to party. I mean, bass so loud it literally shook the sides of my van. Lasers. I can only assume a wide variety of alcohols, hallucinogenics, and amphetamines.
All my favorite stuff!
And I just… didn’t… WANNA.
I even had some young tanned adventurers walk past the van and invite me down- all were welcome! And I had several nights where I sat up on my hill, looking down at what was probably the party to end all parties happening right there, and I just… didn’t… wanna.
So I have this friend, Shawn, and I am literally crawling out of my skin right now imagining his thunderous look of disapproval if and when he ever reads this. Shawn is responsible for roughly 76% of all the fun I’ve ever had in my life, and he had to drag me into most of that. I have no doubt that if Shawn had somehow been able to get airlifted in, we would have walked down to that party and had the kinds of fun that result in sober cautionary-tale-memoirs thirty years later.
But Shawn wasn’t there… And I didn’t go to the party.
Why? I couldn’t tell you. I just didn’t want to, in that weirdly stubborn way I can be sometimes where I just deeply know I’m right, even though it doesn’t make any sense. I didn’t go out into the desert to party, man. I was trying to prove something to myself! They had just showed up, why should I let the potentially most fun night of my life distract me from my Desert Exile?
Haha man, I don’t know. It sounds a bit silly to me now, and I’m sure not going to that party will be a regret I like to pull out and polish now and again. But I just didn’t wanna; and I Must Obey The Inscrutable Exhortations Of My Soul. So I sat in my camp chair with my laptop and a glass of scotch, looking at the far-distant party people doing party people things, and was weirdly happy with my decision.
Just don’t tell Shawn.
WHERE TO NEXT, INTREPID EXPLORER?
So after driving past all the hungover party people and waving saucily at them, I had to decide where to go next. I wasn’t exactly sure of my course, but I knew two things:
It was time to get the fuck out of California
If I didn’t at least drive through Joshua Tree (National Park), 10-20 people would hang me by my thumbnails the next time they saw me
Unfortunately, driving through Joshua Tree NP did not in any way coincide with MY number one requirement- which was to get a goddamn shower. I’d done pretty well with heating up water on the stove, washing up, rinsing off, and fighting the worst of the dirty stank, but three weeks without a shower is just too long. I proved I could do it, I had the trophy to put on the shelf, but WHERE IN THE HELL is the closest Planet Fitness?
Not very close, apparently, and in the wrong direction. Especially if i’m going to drive through the national park. And the next closest Planet Fitness is near Phoenix- which I don’t want to get to just yet.
Ah, I’d almost forgotten this! The decision paralysis. This has been a huge part of this adventure- what do I want to do, what do I have to do, and how can I accomplish both using limited time and Adventure Gas(tm)?
And as always, the grace of others saved me. Part of my reason for avoiding the Desert Party was that I was getting close to a writing milestone, and had been super-ultra focused on that… and got there! It’s one of the reasons I left the desert a few days early; I felt like I’d earned a few days away from the keyboard, and figured spending them driving and prepping for the next stint in a different desert sounded nice.
One of the Cousins, however, had sent me a little cash with the directive that I was supposed to get a nice meal- And holy hell, if there was ever a time in my entire goddamn life where a nice meal would be appreciated, it was this one. I put this lovely bit of generosity together with a new friend I made in LA’s recommendation, and a bit of Google Maps ninjitsu, and Got Myself A Plan.
With a little bit of zigging and zagging- but not too much! I could accomplish the following:
Get a shower
Get some beer and barbecue at a legendary spot in a place called PIONEERTOWN
Cram the natural splendor of Joshua Tree National Park into my eyeballs
Head south and east- without too much backtracking- and land in a little town called Yuma, just over the border into Arizona
And that, my friends, is exactly what I did.
Man, I cannot express to you how good a beer and barbecue tastes, after three weeks of penny-pinching in the desert. And how nice it was to see other humans! And to just sit on a bar-stool. If any of you are worried that this adventure is just me becoming a dirty desert hermit, this should comfort you. Well, I mean, I AM becoming a dirty desert hermit- but hopefully just a temporary one.
Another sensation that literally cannot be put into words is taking a shower after three weeks without one. And the Planet Fitness gods were smiling yesterday, too; sometimes those showers can be a bit hit-and-miss; never cold but you know, lukewarm, and sometimes more a trickle than a good pissin’, if you get me. But this one was as hot as Satan’s Hell and like standing under the Niagara Falls. Who needs party drugs and lasers- this is what fun feels like.
So, freshly showered and freshly stuffed full of world-class barbecue, I found one of the only Walmarts in the state that doesn’t mind us dirty vanfolk, and got some sleep, because the next day…
MY GOD, JOSHUA TREE DOES NOT DISAPPOINT
Yeah, yeah, yeah- I get it. You can all shut up about Joshua Tree now. It’s incredible.
I was primed to hate it, too; I forgot that extremely popular National Parks tend to charge you to drive through them, but I was already committed so I had to tear a painful little chunk out of the Adventure Gas budget and hand it to some smug park ranger. Man, where’s a good Government Shutdown when I need one, amirite? Oh, probably like, next month? Jesus. Can we fire all these clowns already?
ANYWAYS, I was daring Joshua Tree to be worth the sacrifice of Adventure Gas; at this point, how could it be? Seething, I drove into desert that looked an awful lot like the desert I’d been looking at for the last three weeks anyways. Perhaps with some bumpier rocks, I guess. And I did finally see a cactus. And then…
I won’t spam too many photos, but holy hell, if I’d been missing rocks, they were out in force here.
And then, after so many cool rock formations I was starting to feel like I was in Cool Rock Disneyland, Joshua Tree decided to trot out the friggin’ cactus garden:
I love those little spiky, glowing motherfuckers so much! And then, after a spectacularly beautiful hour-long winding drive down through a huge basin surrounded by extravagantly gorgeous mountains, I found a goddamn oasis in the desert. I keep saying that this thing or that thing is my favorite of the trip, but this thing was genuinely one of my favorites of the trip. It was this tight cluster of huge palm trees, surrounded by rocks and desolation, and there was like this cave inside them that felt like I’d stepped into a literal other world. These pics do this place 0% justice. Suffice it to say, apparently SOME experiences are worth the sacrifice of a little bit of Adventure Gas.
Some.
As always and forever, thank ya for making it this far with me. Ill be back with you next week to exhaustively document how the deserts in California differ from those in Arizona- hold on to your butts!
Love reading these! Im so glad your keeping up with the posts