Description: Wherein Marty and Heather leave the City of Sin and head to Joshua Tree, CA.
(Marty's Report):
Funny how quickly one can create homes out of temporary residences, although at the end of the day, I suppose they're all temporary residences. So maybe it's, funny how quickly we can forget about mortality and attach to physical symbols of permanence. Like this AirBnB, which I woke up in on this Monday morning, next to my beloved wife, and commenced loading John up with our stuff, while the mildly insane guy wandered around playing out some internal drama that involved leaves and aggressive throwing of them onto awnings and cars and pigeons. I avoided eye contact, but kept an eye on him.The crew got suited up, and drove to the LV airport, through a pristine town, with beautifully manicured freeways. How did it get this way? It's like they have a lab under some casino which has developed "unnecessarily messy and visually distracting stuff" eating microbes. Jenny, Nathan, and Dante disembarked and commenced their way homeward, whilst we set off further into the desert wilds, with first stop, Target for a new blow up mattress pump.
Then Hoover Dam. What an amazing piece of construction, and design. My family had gone there when I was maybe 10, when we went on a road trip in the station wagon. I remember us going down on the tour into the guts of the dam, and water dripping down slightly mossy walls like you were inside a castle. Apparently it will be one of the last human artifacts left on the planet after we are all Raptured, or when the LV microbes mutate and consider us "unnecessarily messy". (We learned that in "Life After People," a TV series which examined what would happen on the Earth if humans suddenly disappeared.) The Dam seemed mostly the same, though the visitor center was fancier than I remember.We parked on the Arizona side and walked back, deciding that the line into the dam tour was too long, and so headed back in California (it was good to be back home), and headed out towards Joshua Tree, about a four hour drive from the Dam. We got some Taco Bell to fortify us for the journey, the same nourishing meals that early settlers used to nourish their bodies and spirits on their long and dangerous, cactus-filled journeys. And to distract the horse-sized lizards that existed in the 1800's, which have now gone extinct. (Many legacy boots and saloon jackets were made from the skins of these lizards. Not many people know that these days.)
Somehow, crossing the mostly-empty-desert, Heather remembered--or maybe saw a sign for--a place called Solar 1, a relatively huge solar installation that (given my increasingly diminishing appreciation for the desert) seemed a good use of the space. It has the quality of all industrial facilities who don't have to cater to public image, being a quiet and spacious confidence in making shit, without a real awareness of the "watching public," such that you immediately feel sort of welcomed and ignored at the same time. I like places like this. Some part of me that is already so "meta" and complex in trying to coordinate too many perspectives--it gets to relax amidst simple productivity.A long road ahead of us, we drove through the Nevada desert, with its subtle ecology that altered subtly as we drove along. Whatever mystic overlays I'd had with the desert from my 20's, though, seemed to have evaporated in the intervening 20 years. I found it more sad and under-stimulating than anything. But we enjoyed each other and our wandering and meandering conversations. It's good to have a wife that you actually like to hang out with. She's awesome.
But not invincible, because she'd come down with a cold that got worse in Vegas (she was sidelined some of the time on Sunday, at the seminar). So we decided not to camp, and got a room at the $50/night High Desert Motel, and the route into this Joshua Tree (the town, and the National Monument) abode was through 29 Palms, and seemingly unnamed burgs.
They were dismal. You could almost smell the meth cooking, and the humanity gone to seed. The "towns" looked like plastic bags blown over the landscape. The city planners had probably gotten busted for meth production and hadn't gotten replaced because the county supervisors were supporting their habits by siphoning off the trickle of public tax money that got produced by the fast food chains. Yeah, like that. Joshua Tree the Town was slightly more developed and organized, but reminded me a bit of a slightly larger scale version of the houses my brother and I made from spare cardboard and plywood.
We arrived at the High Desert Motel a bit road weary, and were accosted briefly by a young man unpacking his desert mobile (a red worse for wear SUV) who told us, because he wanted to, about being "Ten weeks alone in the desert!" I've had several bad experiences with such leechy fucks like this, so I just nodded or grunted and went up to our room. Most people are more subtle in how they try to steel you energy or get themselves off at your expense, but not these parasite travelers I've met. Thankfully, brief and not followed up on.
We had some energy before dinner, so drove the loop through Joshua Tree (the park), and I was surprised by at how small it felt, and how diminutive the rock formations felt, that had been so impressive to me in my 20's. We had some twilight, and then descending darkness as we drove, stopping at one point to turn off the car and soak in the utter silence. Beautiful, but, again, strangely "small" energetically.We found comestibles at the Crossroads Cafe in Joshua Tree the Town, a somewhat hippified enclave in a leather-skinned red neck town, where the food was decent and we enjoyed a young elfin child wandering about while his rock climbing parents ate with a friend. Home for some TV and computer activities, then drifting off into the right brained terrain of night.
(Heather's Report):
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