I could learn a lesson or two from the truck.
I was worried over nothing. It was one of my classic worries. Would we get to the campground early enough to get a site or would it be full already? My mind… it was too busy conjuring up what-ifs. You know, with my luck there would be only one campsite left on this three day holiday weekend, and it would be too small for the trailer and truck, or just too difficult to back the rig in to because of one tree or a rock in the wrong place. And then I'd have to conjure up someplace else to camp and keep on driving when I wanted to stop, when I'd already be tired and cranky. I had my heart set on this place. Grumble, grumble...worry, worry, worry. You know how I get.
We pulled the trailer along with us to the clinic on Friday morning so we could leave right at closing time. Driving over Kirker Pass first thing that morning, I realized just how happy the truck was to be working again. With the truck it's all about the journey. The destination is not important. Destination is just another place to park while everybody else gets to have fun. Trucks have to be patient when parked. Nothin’ else to do.
Now pulling a trailer...that's a worthwhile endeavor for a truck. You can tell he likes it. Driving daily, empty, back and forth to work and home is no trick. Heck, he can idle along in sixth gear to get us there and not break a sweat. Packing a load makes him happy. The trailer makes him happy. You can hear it in the suddenly joyful rumble from the exhaust. He was made for this. That gear selector is meaningless without a load, but when ya pack him up, all those gear ratios start to make sense. And set him to work on a long uphill grade and he leans into the harness and the grin spreads across his grill.
Heck, when loaded the truck even likes long, boring I-5.
In the dark, in the rain, in the Central Valley, there's not much to see, but I can still notice things. Cruise control set on a few over legal, we plod along in the number two lane while the crazies wail past on the left, cut us off to pass two mini-vans on the right, and then zip back into the hammer lane in time to slam on the brakes again behind the next idiot who is only going fifteen over the limit. Maybe two seconds shaved off a six hour trip. The truck is a slow and steady kinda dude. Down the long, seemingly endless ribbon of asphalt he rumbles. Content just to pull.
That collection of fast food outlets, closed fruit stands that lean a bit in the wind, cheap motels, and peddlers of fossil fuel at each freeway exit is like one frame, where the miles of interstate highway filled with vehicles is the movie. It gives you a slice of the whole, frozen for the time it takes to fill a tank, a stomach, and a toilet. In such places you get to meet the people who infest all those cars you saw lined up, lights stretching to the horizon in the dark. And if you are not careful, or just a bit bored, you might draw conclusions from these brief encounters.
Like:
Whoever coined the term, “the dumbing down of America” was like, totally right. Apparently, even though the process of taking an order, nuking a burger, stacking the right stuff on a bun, and getting the correct collection of un-healthy food into the correct bag has been simplified beyond all reason, as a society we can no longer produce anyone clever enough to do even this rudimentary task in a timely manner.
Nobody speaks English in this country anymore, and that includes the folks born and edjumacated here.
Milling around in a colorful crowd in the confined space in front of the hamburger store counter, waiting ever so patiently for two hamburgers, fries and diet sodas, I looked around at my fellow travellers. Taking up two tables, a family of Southern California type cast stamped from the mold just like everybody else people talked among themselves, oblivious to the poor lady calling out their number, two bags of burgers dangling from her hands. Back under the heat lamps the bags went.
Save for the plastic people and me, everyone in the building was Hispanic, and most stood quietly, looking around furtively, waiting to get caught and sent back to whatever hopelessness they had fled, hoping to do better as slaves here. One guy was duded out in black cowboy had, pearl button shirt, serving plate belt buckle and TIGHT jeans, with his Saturday night boots on. He was skinny as a rail. Everybody else was fat, especially the too many kids and the moms with the blank looks. They waited patiently for their food. They looked like they have survived on patience for an eternity. They tolerated the retched inefficiency of the place much better than I.
The lady behind the counter called out #31 again, and this time Barb and Ken and The Kids heard, and he quickly fetched their dinner. By that point the pictures of the burgers on the sign likely would taste better, but they hardly noticed as they crammed rubbery burgers into their orthodonitically perfect mouths.
Remember the time long ago when the guy selling you gas could also fix your car? Well, don't try that now. That product of California schools behind the counter in the gas station mini mall sold me well aged coffee, but when I mentioned the condition of the bathrooms to her, her blank face lost even more detail, cause that wasn’t her job, YOU KNOW.
California collects taxes on all that fuel you buy, specifically intended to keep the roads in some semblance of repair, but for years, in case you haven’t noticed, they haven’t spent much on road repair. All that tax money has gone into the general toilet, er fund, and the roads have been left to rot. And boy can you tell. I-5 is just a bit smoother than a slightly used minefield.
Back on the road it doesn’t get much better. Really strange people call talk radio in the dark when you are trapped on that endless black ribbon in the rain. At first you shake your head in disbelief, but to change the station is the only true coping mechanism. Problem is, in the valley in the dark the only choices seem to be whether you get to listen to idiots in our language, or in Spanish.
Satellite radio helps. It offers some choice in the listening. We dialed up the Road Dog, the professional truckers channel on Sirius. Plodding along in the two lane pulling the trailer eventually lends itself to listening to the truckers as they complain about us. An item on their news broadcast: A professional clown was elected to the Brazilian senate. His campaign slogan? “What the heck, it can't get any worse.” Along with the lady porn star who was once elected to national office in Italy, it would seem that we all get the governments we deserve, or at least that our choices in characters running the place are somewhat limited. The rest of the news simply follows from this.
We turned left at Bakersfield. Bakersfield is best done in the dark. It smells the same, but ya can’t see as much. Consider that a blessing.
Surrounded by generica, the Wal-Mart parking lot was dotted with parked RV's. Nice new rigs used by retired people who have nosed the grindstone, done well in their lives, and can now reap some of the reward, at least until the price of diesel destroys their lifelong plans, sat next to some less inspiring vehicles no doubt occupied by artists, writers, or similar bums. With our well-seasoned trailer, we are almost ready to blend in with that second group for our golden years. We joined them all for a few hours of sleep. Then in the early hours of a fresh day we gave the diesel its head as we trotted over Tehachapi Pass. Mike's Cafe waited for us in Mojave.
Breakfast at Mike's can happen all day long, and it's worth the price. Don’t tell em, but they could hit you up for a cover charge, just for the entertainment. The old pedal cars still line the shelf rimming the place high on the wall. We’d love to learn the stories of each of these treasures. They each made some kid happy on a birthday or Christmas, and those kids are now old or gone, and ya wonder if they remember those times.
Our harried waitress was a short chubby perky young Hispanic lady in a low cut blouse, with a red white and blue American flag tattooed on the, uh, left one. The café was crowded, and the patrons kept her flag waving as she hurried about the room.
They have thin paperback books on the tables, humor writing revolving around coping with life’s little trials. The book I was sampling was titled, “Things To Say To Idiots.” Ben Goode, the author has much to tell and ya’all could benefit from his observations. The one sentence I read while waiting on my pile of home fries, eggs, salsa, and spicy sliced beefsteak had something to do with folks who think like they have had their brains pierced, too. I figured I could use that description sometime, and I would be sure to give credit where due for this brilliance. (I wonder if Mr. Goode now lives in a tilting, rusting, seen better days RV?)
The loud crude guy at the booth in the corner was complaining to his friends about how he had just been diagnosed with diabetes, and no he wasn't gonna do all that silly stuff they wanted to force him to do to take care of himself. His friends were trying to talk some sense into his head, but it would have been pretty lonely in there. Sometimes, I have learned, the less some people know about something, the louder they proclaim their ignorance. This guy did a splendid job with that.
The quiet older fellow in the next booth got up to leave, and he turned to wish the mouth well as he passed. He hobbled in serious pain, thanks to his diabetic neuropathy, he said, and he now viewed a murky world through bottle thick glasses. He mentioned this to the loud mouthed lout, along with a statement that the narcotic pain meds he was compelled to take had just about wrecked his life. This fate, or worse, would be the stubborn man’s own if he didn’t listen to his (ours? Since we likely paid for them) doctors. The lout's only retort was that he had once been a junkie, so he knew all about that, and he didn’t much care. Shaking his head, the gentleman left the mullet behind.
Mr. Tard was annoyed and annoying, but he soon got up with his friends to leave. Watching him, I believe he did have a brain piercing to go with his tats and backwards ball cap. I shook my head, too. He had been offered good advice, and it was nothing to get pithed about. He left the place clouded in uncomfortable silence, having wasted all that oxygen while he was there.
I-15 was like I-5, except the traffic ran much faster. It looked like all of Southern California was needed in Vegas, and they were all in a hurry to get there. We let em go on without us at a lonely exit, and traded crowded asphalt for a far more primitive path.
Three miles, plus or minus, of washboard gravel road. All the way up to third gear on the straight-a-ways. Enough inconvenience to keep most of the rabble out. Most everybody on the interstate was headed toward a city. We weren’t. Nobody else was on this road, even though for a while you could see the cars on the freeway in the mirror, so we hadn’t gone far. Fifteen miles an hour and still the fillings rattled in our teeth. Lovely desert desolation on all sides. Round the last corner and we could see the silver cantilever bridge where the railroad crosses the river, and the bushes where the Phainopeplas perch and chirp, and the campground. Nearly empty. All that worry for nothing. I felt better, but we disappointed our truck. Parked for a day of nothing but reading, writing, napping and looking. He will get over it.
Rain drummed on the trailer that night as we slept. The wind pummeled. A few trains rumbled past in the dark. Dreams came and went, odd dreams fueled by the crud dump happening in my brain as it realized it was free to do what was necessary to fix that which was bent in my head, out in the desert and the empty. You will need to reboot when the delete process is complete. And make a cup of strong coffee in the morning.
Morning quiet. Pink clouds. Wet ground. Slaked vegetation. A desert cottontail runs through the campsite. Someday, if he doesn’t learn to stay under cover, he will make that hawk over there very happy.
It always rains when we go to the desert. This time it snowed on Mountain Pass, and the Joshua trees and yucca wore a mantle of white, which is kinda weird. Southern Californians stopped on the freeway shoulder to take pictures of each other in front of the strange white stuff. Brief stops, because they don’t do cold.
Everybody on earth was in Vegas that weekend. I’m happy for the merchants. Even those uh, affiliated folks who profit, win or lose, through the decades in this God forsaken place. Those prognosticators on the news who tell us the economy is getting better, or simply doomed, should see this place. It’s either the mercury rising or the end of the world is at hand, take you pick, but the decadence is thriving. Crowds of wide-eyed tourists mobbed the Strip, a mass orgy of imitation fun, which will all stay in Vegas when they leave, along with piles of their dollars.
We left Vegas, and that was clearly the best part of our time there. I should learn from this. When leaving Vegas becomes the highlight of the trip, it’s time to find another place to go to put in my time listening to those lectures I need. The oppression of the city spilled off our shoulders as we ran screaming away from that place. And right outside of there was the glory of the colored hills surrounding Lake Mead and the wonder of the new bridge at Hoover Dam, and short hours later we were camped in the desert again, listening to a babbling stream. In a land of improbably colored rocks, Saguaro cactus, ocotillo, cholla, and blue herons we found a flat spot, turned on the songs, and watched the sun course toward the southwest, and I found some words again instead of just the frustration of a blank computer screen. It takes so little with me. I should learn from this, too.
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