Fun with Food

“If this people has so atrophied its taste buds as to find tasteless food not only acceptable but desirable, what of the emotional life of the nation?”

In addition to billboards, the air along the highways is populated with sky signs for individual businesses, many of them familiar from TV adverts or long hours spent on the road. You look out across a town from the highway and see a forest of signs. In this medium you can see every store between the highway and the edge of town two miles away. They are largely recognizable brand names: Denny’s, Carl’s Jr., Super 8, Conoco, Wal-Mart, Starbucks. All vying for your attention, and ultimately, your money. Around here, when they say. “You can’t miss it,” they mean it—you really can’t. They’ve hit you with advertising on every possible surface.

We spent several miles driving behind a Frito Lay truck whose back panel advertised: “Food for the fun of it.” Not because you’re hungry, not because it’s healthy, but because it’s fun. That’s why we eat. Food is the center of social life. And it’s not just a little food, it’s mountains of it. Rice Krispies treats, chips and salsa, peanuts, cookies, sandwiches, potato salad, coffee with vanilla caramel hazelnut creamer, everything with high fructose corn syrup, or butter, or mayonnaise, no fresh vegetables in sight.

These days our food has almost nothing to do with nature. The tide was already turning in this direction when Steinbeck made his journey. “The food is oven-fresh, spotless and tasteless; untouched by human hands,” he wrote. This is no way to eat. “I remembered with an ache certain dishes in France and Italy touched by innumerable human hands.” (71) On our travels we once again observed the truism that everything tastes better cooked over a campfire: steak, mushrooms, bacon, potatoes. Take the best Kobe beef in the world, cook it indoors, and we defy you to find it tastier than a plain old sirlion grilled over an open wood flame. No sauce, no spice, just wood and smoke and meat. It doesn’t get better.

But as we made our trademark campfire burritos with the items we’d purchased at the local market earlier the same evening, we noticed a disturbing trend on the labels of the various packages. The packaging proudly informed us there was no lard, no saturated fat, no genetically modified ingredients, artificial colors, or preservatives in our tortillas. The cheese was “all natural,” the refried beans were fat free. Apart from the question of how on earth it’s possible to categorize something fat-free as “refried,” we were appalled by these efforts to protect our health. We’re treated like big babies who can’t be trusted to choose between healthy and unhealthy. We’re presented with only one option. And this is considered progress.

Steinbeck observed the nascence of this trend too. At one hotel, his “two water tumblers were sealed in cellophane sacks with the words: ‘These glasses are sterilized for your protection.’ Across the toilet seat a strip of paper bore the message: ‘This seat has been sterilized with ultraviolet light for your protection.’ Everyone was protecting me and it was horrible.” (38) Today every gas station and shopping mall offers toilet seat covers in its restrooms for the protection of the consuming public.

Even Steinbeck’s home territory in the Salinas Valley has fallen victim to marketing.  It’s easy to see why Steinbeck was inspired by this landscape. Green and blue mountains embrace green and gold valleys glowing gently in the early evening light. You can smell the life in the soil; the air is full of the rich scent of earth. Blue sky stretches tight like a drum down to the horizon. Small towns dot the landscape and people absorb and spread the warmth of the sun. But there are shadows too; long shadows of migrant workers across the acres of land they till, none of which belongs to them. There are flimsy clapboard houses and sturdy red barns alongside huge Victorian style mansions and enormous warehouses. They all cast shadows across the fields and up the hillsides in the setting sun.

There are still some small family farms here, but there are also agri-business giants, such as Dole, which is responsible for the plastic signs lining the road, telling us about coming attractions. “Coming Soon – Romaine Lettuce,” with a big red arrow pointing at the bare earth, just in case passing motorists don’t know where lettuce comes from. You can imagine the men in suits sitting around a conference table dreaming up a new marketing scheme: How to make vegetables sexy. Farm tours are advertised on giant signs; growing food has become a tourist attraction.

We noticed similar billboards in LA advertising the great outdoors with slogans like, “Rolling hills for your viewing pleasure,” and “You never know what you’ll find in the forest,” with a picture of a famous cartoon character superimposed on an idyllic woodland scene. We’ve reached a point where we have to advertise going outside. People have to be convinced it’s as good as TV.

Throughout this valley, the mobile homes Steinbeck wrote about with curiosity and cautious enthusiasm are parked in clusters with peeling paint, surrounded by slowly disintegrating cars and millions of dollars’ worth of equipment bought from John Deere on credit. Gonzalez, just south of Salinas, is a town of identical tract homes in one of three colors: adobe, beige, or grey. Salinas itself has at least two McDonald’s and two Denny’s, all of which are “always open.” Like children, we need the reassurance that comes with constant access to the familiar; we demand the paradoxical convenience of choice and predictability. It’s all a bit depressing.

Leaving Los Angeles

“I’ve driven this thing all over the country—mountains, plains, deserts. And now I’m back in my own town, where I live—and I’m lost.”

Getting lost is underrated.

We spent several days in Los Angeles seeing friends. Alissa had lived there on and off for over 15 years. And yet she couldn’t remember everything. Once she’d known every freeway interchange, every route and several back-up options depending on the time of day and the traffic. Not anymore.

So we had to trust a computer. The GPS was on loan from an aunt, who insisted we take it on the rest of the trip and return it to her as and when. We’d rolled into LA, hot and covered with the dust of three different deserts, in time for a family BBQ. We told the story of how we spent day two of the trip desperately seeking a road atlas.

We had stopped at three gas stations before we found one with an atlas. Third time lucky. We went in and asked, and the man behind the counter looked puzzled for a moment and said, “I think we have one…somewhere.” He rummaged around and pulled out a full road atlas, the 2011 Rand McNally. It was their only copy. We thought that was odd until we got up to the register to pay, and he said, “So don’t you have a GPS or an iPhone or anything?” It wasn’t until then that it clicked and we realized how out of step we were. A map? Really? What luddites! We could already see our non-existent teenage children rolling their eyes in disgust. And as we were laughing about this over dinner, our aunt apparently decided that we did, in fact, require a GPS, and that it might somehow save us from some as-yet-unidentified horror. It was very generous of her.

We quickly found ourselves relying on the innocuous female voice emanating from the little box on our dashboard. And when it told us to take a wrong turn, we didn’t contradict it. Our instincts said it was wrong, but we trusted the technology. Turns out, technology lies. Or at least makes mistakes. But we had to drive 15 miles before we realized it. That’s how much a person is capable of forgetting in the space of eight intervening years.

After one day of driving in LA, we discovered that maps, and the attention they require you to pay to your route, are in fact much more reliable precisely because they don’t let you complacently sit back and be told what to do by the pleasantly bland and inoffensive voice of a woman who, it must be admitted, sometimes gets it wrong.  We managed to sneak the little black box back into our dear aunt’s study in the small hours of the morning, and we happily cruised up and down the coast with just our trusty Rand McNally and our own navigation skills. And we still got lost, but we had a lot more fun doing it.

That evening after several wrong turns and backtracks, we finally made it to Huntington Beach. We sat on the pier with Oreo milkshakes from Ruby’s and watched the surfers glide over the golden waves in the setting sun. Sometimes getting lost means a sidetrip or a delay; sometimes it changes your destination entirely. Either way, the moments you choose to relax into and enjoy are the ones that matter.

Billboards

“From start to finish I found no strangers.  If I had, I might be able to report them more objectively.  But these are my people and this my country.  If I found matters to criticize and to deplore, they were tendencies equally present in myself.”

One of our sources of information, wonder, and hilarity on our long journey across the desert was billboards, a form of mobile advertising for a mobile society. These days they even alternate; two or three adverts (a.k.a. advertisements) will cycle through on a single electronic billboard, just in case you happen to be sitting in traffic. They wouldn’t want you to get bored looking at the same ad for more than five seconds. These billboards are sparse, though still present, on the open road in the middle of long sections of still-wild land. But they build in a crescendo of marketing as you near what counts as civilization, until they reach their riotous climax in the heart of the next city.

We saw billboards advertising the newest models of pickup trucks: “It swallowed a luxury car.” “If it were any tougher it would be making its own license plate.” Steinbeck knew that American automobiles “are made to wear out so that they must be replaced.” (43) This is “the greatest selling appeal of all – one that crawls through nearly all American life. Improvements are made on these [models] every year. If you are doing well you turn yours in on a new model…if you can possibly afford to. There’s status to that.” (76) Not much has changed, apart from the ubiquity of the advertisements trying to convince you to trade up so you can move up.

But America has also moved into whole new realms of advertising. Even hospitals need billboards these days. We saw one depicting a man on a stretcher being lifted into an ambulance. He looked strangely content under the circumstances, and the slogan in huge letters across this incongruous scene read, “Take me to Swedish.” It was clearly his choice of hospital that made him forget his potentially life-threatening injury. A byline at the bottom of the billboard informed us that the emergency room is open 24/7, as if there were any other option.

You know healthcare is in a sad state when you need to pay for advertisements for hospitals. As if anyone who’s just been found bleeding copiously at the site of a serious car accident will say to the police or paramedics, “Take me to Swedish. I saw their ad, and their ER is open 24/7. Looks like a nice place.” Of course not. If you need the ER you’re going to go to the nearest one, because that’s the definition of emergency.

A billboard for a new wing at Presbyterian Hospital advertised their 34 new private rooms. Because who wants to share?

The highways are also blemished with dozens of billboards for personal injury lawyers. They even have blogs and websites with names like “justice for victims,” as if “justice” and “victim” are words that should be applied to car accidents. This is how important words and concepts lose all real meaning. You’re not a victim because someone accidentally rear-ends you at a stoplight; that’s an accident. That’s why it’s called an accident.

We wonder whether it’s too easy in America to lose sight of what real suffering is. We’ve even commoditized victimhood. The idea that you can put a price on justice is a fundamental misunderstanding of what justice is. Advertising becomes a way to borrow nobility and apply it to the ignoble random occurrences of life.

Together with ideas of justice and victimhood, the concept of need has lost its anchor in reality. At one point we drove past an enormous grey warehouse called the Windchime Center. Because you need a whole center devoted to something as essential as windchimes. Tourist routes in the Southwest are lined with rock shops. Just in case you couldn’t find a suitable rock on your own, Dave’s Rocks can meet all your rock-buying needs. Advertising no longer caters to our needs; beginning with Henry Ford all the way through its latest incarnation in Steve Jobs, advertising creates wants and repackages them as needs.

In no place on our travels was this invention of new necessities more evident than in Los Angeles. LA is packed from the Pacific Ocean to the San Bernardino Mountains, stuffed several stories deep with every conceivable thing its citizens could invent or imagine. When we revisited Denver, we noticed that many things had changed. There was new urban sprawl, new houses, new businesses. But revisiting LA, there was no room for new sprawl. The only way to go is up, and this is evident in the advertising methods, the huge number of billboards and sky signs and enormous banners towed behind tiny airplanes, all pushing some new artificial necessity of plastic, steel, or silicon. And somewhere, sometime, someone says, “Hey, I need that!”

Tourist Traps

“I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.”

Just outside of Palm Springs is a robotic dinosaur museum. From the highway, you can see the life-sized T-Rex with glowing orange eyes sizing up a life-sized Brontosaurus. It is one of the worst tourist traps ever, which paradoxically makes it a must-see.

There are amazing places like this all along the desert highways, places that have been there for decades. Out here in the shimmering heat you can always find a place with a two-headed snake on display. There may not be food, or water, or bathrooms, but there is always a two-headed snake. You wonder how they manage to keep attracting generation upon generation of tourists. Is it nostalgia, or curiosity, or boredom? Is it parents subjecting their offspring to the same torture they endured in some endless inter-generational string of schadenfreude? Or is it the same instinct that makes us slow down to gawk at a bad traffic accident?

Steinbeck tended to avoid these places, but we find them hard to resist. Gawking is one of the essential pleasures of a good road trip. Ghost towns, two-headed calves, jackalopes, the world’s largest thermometer; it’s all here, and it’s all terribly wonderful. It’s a sense of wonder that fills the parking lots at these places; not the awe-inspired wonder of a giant sequoia or a raging red sunset, but a surprisingly strong desire to see something unique, something slightly macabre, something great (even if “great” is a very relative term). Time and again we found that we were not alone at these places. Curiosity peoples this country, and for some reason the hotter it gets, the more interesting these little tourist traps become. We were sorry to leave them behind.

There were masses of traffic headed into LA on a sunny afternoon. It was stop and go, 20 mph or less, for over an hour. And then suddenly, for no apparent reason, the lanes clear and we’re back up to 80 mph. It’s just a bunch of people tailgating, slamming on the brakes, swerving between lanes, being stupid and generally creating chaos and gridlock.

There’s a lot of pleasure in a wide-open four-lane highway on a clear California evening with the sun setting over the Pacific. The light has a special quality; we know it’s the smog that does it, but even so.

The Gas Canister Saga

“We’d be lousy explorers. A few days out and we get the mullygrubs. The first white man through here…his little jaunt took eight years. And he himself didn’t make it this far. Four of his men did, though…We’re soft, Charley.”

Epic battle of wills

I feel the need to tell you a story. This is a bit of an interlude, but I think it’s an essential aspect of the trip. Matt disagrees, but that’s as good a reason as any to insist on telling it.

This is the story of our gas canister. Somewhere in the middle of New Mexico, with the sun beating down and the two of us each drinking close to a gallon of water every day, Matt decided we needed a gas canister. Something to carry in the trunk just in case we ran out of gas on some god-forsaken two-lane road and were found weeks later, nothing but dry bones and a great big pile of molten metal and burned rubber.

So we stopped at True Value. This is a compromise between the Mom-and-Pop hardware stores that used to proliferate in small towns across the country and the giant Home Depot warehouses that currently sit just off the highway outside most major cities.

What we found was a place air-conditioned by a series of large oscillating fans, where there is still a gumball machine at the entrance, and they give away free American-flag keychains at the cash register. After searching up and down the aisles, we finally found a large red plastic gas canister hiding atop one of the shelving units against the back wall.  It was $10.99. Matt was horrified by the exorbitant price. He actually uttered the phrase, “I remember the day…” I pointed out to him that “the day” was approximately 12 years ago, which didn’t help. In any case, the gas canister was deemed essential to our emergency provisions, so we bought it, along with two gumballs, which were wonderful and horrible in equal measure.

We went next door to the gas station, filled up the canister, and I left Matt to cap it while I went in to pay. I came out to find him wrestling with the canister while a large man watched from the bed of his pickup truck in the next parking space. I offered to help, but since I am far from expert in these matters, I wasn’t much use. I sat on the hood of the car and drank my rootbeer while Matt wrestled with the recalcitrant plastic hose. After what seemed like forever in the baking heat, he wedged the closed canister into the trunk and we were off.  Temporarily.

Several miles down the road the car began to smell like gasoline. We pulled over and Matt pulled out the canister to find that it had been leaking. Several more minutes were spent in the sun, prodding and pleading with the red plastic demon. We were pretty sure we had it beat, but we wrapped it in a plastic bag just in case, in an effort to save the camping gear from being soaked in gasoline. While our tent is supposedly made of non-flammable material, it seemed best not to tempt fate.

We drove on through the desert and stopped at various points for photographs. At one of these stops, in my search for Wheat Thins and licorice, I made the tragic mistake of opening the trunk. The smell that wafted out was overpowering. I didn’t have to say a word. Matt made a sort of growly sound and yanked the by-now half-empty canister out one more time, laid it on the ground, and proceeded to contort himself around it in an effort to figure out “how the *#@$ ^&%” to make it close.

I helpfully suggested that perhaps if our emergency fuel turned out to be nothing more than a huge fire hazard, it wasn’t actually so necessary to our well-being. Matt did not find this suggestion helpful, so he ignored it and continued grappling with the obstinate canister. I tried again, suggesting that perhaps we should set it free to roam the desert rather than keeping it cruelly caged in the trunk. Matt grunted, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and went right back to it. Now it was a contest of wills, with both the red gas canister and my husband in his red shirt pigheadedly determined to win.

I had taken an endless string of photos and finished most of the licorice when Matt yelled, “Ah HA!” The canister went back in the trunk, and we got back on the road.

When we stopped for the night, the damn thing had leaked again, but only a little bit. I pretended not to notice. So did Matt. But as we drive along taking photos and notes, I’m sure that diabolical thing is smiling quietly to itself in the dimness of the trunk, biding its time.

So now if you read that two unidentified road-trippers have gone out in a blaze of gasoline and glory, taking their RX8, a bunch of camping gear, and one little red gas canister with them, you’ll know why!

To Australia and Beyond

“At the roadsides I never had a really good dinner or a really bad breakfast…I might even say roadside America is the paradise of breakfast.”

Skull Rock, early morning in Joshua Tree

This morning we were up early, trying to beat the heat of the day. We visited Skull Rock, scrambled on Jumbo Rocks, hiked a short trail in Hidden Valley, and then drove out through the west entrance to Joshua Tree National Park. We had a yellow receipt for the camping, and the park ranger was so busy with the long line of cars waiting to get in on this sunny Saturday that he just glanced at the yellow paper from the other side of the booth, assumed it was a receipt for entry, and waved us through. Really we should have paid an extra $15 entrance fee in addition to the $30 we’d paid for camping, because the camping fee only covers an excursion into one side of the park; there is an additional fee if you want to venture beyond the campground on the south side.  But having spent $30 already, we didn’t feel too bad.

The heat shimmered up from the two-lane highway and engulfed the car. On the way out of Joshua Tree Village we stopped at a place called Country Kitchen for a cup of proper American filter coffee. The owner is a woman named Mariene, originally from Cambodia. She had origami dollar bills on the wall, signs thanking her for her support of the local police officers’ fundraiser, letters thanking her for supporting land mine removal in Cambodia, and one for SMART, a group for retired servicepeople who want to travel “to see the country we defend.” Another letter and photo on the wall proclaimed that her son had recently graduated from medical school.

We sat at the bar and asked if it was OK if we just had coffee. She said, “Fine with me, Hun.” She called everyone, including the giant bearded bikers, “Hun.” We sat and listened to her shout across the tiny restaurant, which only had seven tables:  “IT WAS TWO DIET COKES AND AN ICED TEA, RIGHT HUN?”

The restaurant was packed at 11.30am. There was one open table. A woman came in with a southern accent and a newspaper under her arm. Mariene offered her a barstool. She said she’d prefer a table. Mariene told her the lunch rush would be starting soon and she couldn’t afford to give a table to just one person. The woman huffed and puffed and left waving her newspaper, whereupon Mariene loudly announced to the restaurant in general, “Fine by me, Hun! I have no problem seating four at that table, don’t need your business!” Everybody chuckled and kept eating: biscuits and gravy, country fried steak, shortstack blueberry pancakes. It all looked amazing.

A couple came in and sat down next to us, and in the spirit of re-learning how to be Americans, Matt leaned over and struck up a conversation. Turns out they were Australians, on day one of a year-long climbing tour of the Western US and Canada. That’s America for you: sit down at a tiny bar in a tiny restaurant in a tiny town and end up meeting people from halfway across the world. Matt started off asking if they were on their way into J-Tree, and they said they were on their way out. They’d just arrived the night before, flown into LAX jetlagged and hungover, and thought if they were this close to J-Tree, may as well go see it. Now they were stuck because no place in town had a rental car available to get them back to LA. She was chatty, but he just sat back and nodded along, obviously tired.

They asked where we were from; it’s always a safe opener among travelers in strange places. We told them Denver/LA via Japan and Scotland. They wanted to know why. Everyone always asks why: Why Scotland? The answer to that question is always, Why not Scotland?

We wanted to offer them a lift into LA, but one of the few downsides of the RX8 is the lack of a proper back seat. What little space there is, is stuffed full of camping gear, water, and snacks for the road. We missed that aspect of Steinbeck’s trip, being able to pick up strangers along the way and get to know them in the context of a small shared journey to a shared destination. We decided to brave the weekend traffic into LA and we left them to find their way.

It was the first time we were jealous of someone else’s trip, and not vice versa.

These interactions at tiny cafes in tiny towns are one of the things that define not only the American tradition of the road trip, but America in general. One of the biggest things we’re re-learning is how to approach strangers as friends we haven’t yet met.

Life in Desert Places

“And the desert, the dry and sun-lashed desert, is a good school in which to observe the cleverness and the infinite variety of techniques of survival under pitiless opposition.  Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.”

In all our travels, we’ve discovered that a lot of places don’t quite live up to the expectations created by their reputations. Florence, for example, was a disappointment. Or Madrid–meh. But Joshua Tree is not one of those places. It is everything it’s cracked up to be: gorgeous landscape, great hiking and climbing, and surprisingly abundant wildlife and plant life.

As we drove in the yucca were in bloom, huge flags of white flowers on one long stem, towering up to 12 feet above the ground.  Today we saw the whole desert abloom.  Pink, purple blue; yellow, orange, white.  Alissa grew up in LA but she’d never seen any of these flowers before.  It was a cool day, 70F in mid-afternoon, so the birds and lizards were out enjoying the sun as well. We were amazed by the colors and the smells, and we felt fortunate; this only happens for a few weeks out of every year, and we were there to see it.

We’ve also seen quite a bit of wildlife along the way.  In the Petrified Forest we saw an antelope cross our path; as the sun was setting he leisurely meandered up to the road and then ambled across it, oblivious first to our screeching brakes and then to our panicked bumbling with the camera.

In the Painted Desert we saw coyote tracks, and coming down the pass south of Prescott on Highway 9 we saw the real thing cross the road.  We’ve seen roadrunners and enormous hawks and several kinds of lizards whose names we are too ignorant to know.  There is so much variety here, in a place that we so often envision as barren.

We hiked to Lost Palms and Mastadon Peak, we climbed Skull Rock and saw the Hidden Valley. And even in the places that looked devoid of life at first glance, we found small surprises: a rock quail perched atop Skull Rock, lizards sprawled in the sun or digging tunnels in the shade; wildflowers clinging to the south sides of sheer cliffs, oases of water between palm trees, and even wild lilies in Hidden Valley.

There are stories of Hidden Valley being used by cattle rustlers and thieves of various stripes; tough, sun-browned men who were hard enough to eke out a living in a place where those they stole from were too soft to follow. Just one of the infinite variety of survival techniques Steinbeck mentioned. And it’s not so far from here to the origins of our species, who sprang from watered valleys in the middle of vast deserts, and developed their own ingenious techniques to change their environment in ways the desert-dwelling plants and animals could never have conceived.

Later as we roasted marshmallows around the campfire, Alissa asked how our primal ancestors would feel if they could see us using their primary tool, fire, to roast marshmallows. Matt said if they’d had marshmallows, they’d have done the same. Even with the marshmallows and the fancy tent and the fast car, when we’re out here under the vast sky full of stars, listening to the coyotes sing to the moon, it’s easy to feel that we’re not so distant from them after all.

Interlude

“I discovered long ago in collecting and classifying marine animals that what I found was closely intermeshed with how I felt at the moment. External reality has a way of being not so external after all.”

We hope our readers will be patient with an editorial blog this time. We’ll include random photos periodically, just to keep you entertained!

You may have noticed that we’ve posted less over the past few weeks. (If you haven’t noticed, that’s ok, we’ll forgive you!) This is partly due to circumstance, just the general busy-ness of life getting in the way, and partly a conscious choice. We’ve discovered, as much as we love this blog, that it changes the way we travel. Let us explain.

It’s become accepted wisdom that virtually everything in life is subjective. We can argue about questions of “historical fact” or “truth” or “faith,” but when it comes to something like travel writing, I think we can probably agree with the postmodernists, who tell us that what we see depends on where we stand.  In our case, we’ve discovered that what we see also depends on what we happen to be holding in our hands or on our laps at the time.

If I’m looking at a scene through the viewfinder of my camera, I see different things than I would without that lens. If I’m observing something with my laptop open in front of me, or even with a pen and notebook (the kind with paper, not a keyboard) in my hand, then I approach it differently. Instead of losing myself in observation and letting go of self-consciousness for a split second or, if I’m very lucky, for several minutes, I’m constantly in my own head. I’m thinking about how to put what I’m seeing into words. I’m narrating. It’s like the difference between genuinely listening to someone speak, and just nodding along while you formulate your next reply. It not only changes my reaction to a particular scene or situation but influences those aspects that stand out to me, how I remember events later, even my basic perception of what’s happening in front of me. It changes everything.

Recently, Alissa has been cheating on Steinbeck with Annie Dillard. Since Steinbeck’s been dead for almost 50 years, she didn’t think he’d mind too much. In any case, one thing she read in Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek really smacked her upside the head.  Dillard says that self-consciousness hinders our experience of the present moment. The second we become aware of ourselves observing something, looking over our own shoulders, the thing we’re looking at disappears.

She describes herself watching a muskrat on the banks of Tinker Creek. “He never knew I was there. I never knew I was there either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions…And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.” (198)

We think this is hugely perceptive. One of the reasons we travel the way we do is to escape exactly what Dillard describes here, that constant inner monologue that inhabits us as we go about our daily lives. Writing this blog is wonderful in that it allows us to share our experiences with like-minded people, to have conversations and get feedback that would otherwise be impossible. It’s an amazing thing in that respect. But it also changes our travel experience. If we’re zipping along a two-lane country road and Matt whips out a notebook to write down something we’ve seen on a sign or record an impression he’s just had before it slips away, then he might miss something while he’s bent over the page. That’s a risk we’re willing to take, but it is a hazard all the same.

So we’ve taken a break over the last few weeks. We’ll be back on Saturday with more travel notes and (hopefully) witty observations, but for today we’re just going to leave you with our musings about blogging. And also with this photo, which we hope you’ll enjoy!

California Here We Come

“The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.”

Window Rock

We were engulfed in a huge sandstorm between Winslow and Winona. Red dust obliterated the highway for just under a mile; we could see it from several miles down the road, stretching away into the desert on either side and hundreds of feet into the otherwise clear desert sky. Out to the north the horizon disappeared in a red haze. The wind wreaked havoc with the semis and the giant RVs on the road around us.

At this point we made an unfortunate discovery. The RX8 had made its home for years in the Pacific Northwest, where air conditioning is rarely necessary. So the fact that the car’s AC was broken didn’t bother Dad. Up to this point it hadn’t bothered us either; we were cruising along with the sunroof open and the windows down, because at 11am it was already 87 degrees. But it presented a problem in the presence of the swirling desert dust. We had to roll the windows up to avoid choking and ended up sitting in our very own impromptu sweat lodge for several miles.

When we turned off I-40 onto Highway 89 south, we were suddenly in the pine forest. It was high and shady and cool. The temperature dropped to 72 degrees, and in place of adobe houses we started to see log cabins.

Sedona Rock Slide

Nestled in a narrow mountain valley, Sedona is beautiful. Slide Rock State Park was heaving on a holiday weekend, with families swimming and picnicking, but the natural rock slide is long enough and the park is big enough that it doesn’t feel crowded. The slide itself is a combination of slides, jumps, and pools for swimming. Cold, clear water and hot sun; the perfect complement to a dusty night in the desert. Everyone was talking to each other, talking to strangers. Both the atmosphere and the weather were warm. One guy did a backflip into the water and landed on his belly, hard. In Scotland, everyone would have chuckled softly while looking discretely in another direction. In America, everyone shared a laugh, some pointed, and he came up for air yelling “Ow! That hurt!” at the top of his lungs. Complete strangers clapped him on the back as he got out of the water. The town of Sedona itself appeared to host the most massage parlors in ten square miles we’d seen since Bangkok. Every place trumpeted the need for relaxation, offered us an opportunity for rejuvenation, told us we were “worth it.”

After cooling down, we wound our way up through Jerome and back down into Prescott. The road in and out of Jerome is terrifying; hairpin curves and two-lane switchbacks clinging to the sides of sheer cliffs. Matt thought it was a fantastic opportunity to test the RX8’s cornering capabilities. Alissa disagreed.

In marked contrast to the vertiginous roads in the Juniper mountains, we drove the incredibly flat, incredibly straight stretch of highway between Yarnell and Blythe. Up till then it had been high desert, with dry grasses, scrub brush, and sage. Now we began to see Saguaro sentinels on the ridgetops, silhouetted against the high white desert sky. This was stereotypical desert, with the colossal cacti marching in and surrounding us, escorting us to the California state line. These are giants of the earth, growing over 40 feet tall. In the heat haze of the late afternoon the road melted into the horizon, leaving us with the feeling that we were cruising into the sky.

Scott Joplin & Breakfast Burritos

“There are times that one treasures for all one’s life, and such times are burned clearly and sharply on the material of total recall.  I felt very fortunate that morning.”

Why It’s Called the Painted Desert

When the sun came up over the desert we could feel the heat instantly; it was that more than the light that woke us. The wind and the air were still cool but we could feel the sun burning holes through the night air in preparation for a blazing day. The sky was clear, deep blue. On the hike out we met a father and son from Arkansas on their way to Pilot Rock. He wanted to know whether we’d seen any animals, and whether it was going to rain. He seemed disappointed that we’d only seen birds, and coyote prints, and that as far as we knew there was no rain predicted.

Home Sweet Tent

As we reached the lip of the canyon after a long hot climb from the desert floor and were loading our gear into the trunk of the car, we heard the surreal waft of ragtime music on the wind. We looked up to see an enormous cavalcade of 25 motorcycles snaking their way along the cliff-top highway. The lead motorcycle was playing Scott Joplin at high volume, and the whole train was caboosed by a 16-passenger van towing a trailer with “Bob’s Harley Tours” scrawled on the side in big orange letters. Selling the quintessential American experience, complete with soundtrack and emergency provisions.

Joe and Aggie’s Cafe, an institution on Route 66

After our long hike out of the desert we were starved. We stopped for breakfast at Joe and Aggie’s, a locals’ place with faux wood panelling on the walls, ceiling fans and a swamp cooler, leather booths, reading material on the tables, kitschy souvenirs for sale at the glass-topped front counter, and an old jukebox that’s probably been “Out of Order” for a decade or more. It’s family owned and operated, by which they mean that Grandpa sits silently and stoically behind the glass counter that doubles as the gift shop, Dad waits tables, and teenage daughter mopes about with a plastic tub full of dirty dishes. By their own admission they serve Mexican and American food. At 10am on a Saturday, it was full of families, elderly couples, and one biker in leathers who stopped to chat with a Native woman in the corner about custody battles and how he wanted to “get his kids back.”

A family of ten had the table in the middle of the restaurant. At least two of them were called “Bubba.” One of the Bubbas ordered a breakfast burrito to go after finishing his full plate, which was piled high with at least two recommended portions to start with. The waiter made the mistake of trying to take a plate too early and got an actual slap from one of the women, whereupon he announced, “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been bit.” One of the older children, who went by the eponymous “Junior,” had a large plastic spike through his left ear and black horn-rimmed glasses that were missing the left ear piece. After a particularly loud burp from Junior, the oldest Bubba offered to let the waiter keep the kids, and the waiter replied, “We’ve got the perfect closet for ‘em.”

This is the type of diner Route 66 is famous for, and the type of place it’s increasingly hard to find these days. In between getting slapped and offering to closet people’s children, the waiter was running around breathlessly preparing the back room for a huge tour group coming in shortly. We questioned him a bit and discovered that it was a group of 34 Norwegians on a guided Harley tour, presumably the same group we’d seen on their bikes early that morning, blasting the still desert morning full of holes with the manic jackhammer cheerfulness of ragtime music. They were due into the café in 40 minutes. We high-tailed it out of there.