Hotel California & the Fountain of Youth

A solo birthday on the road

Hot and windless desert afternoon. Luna and I are out for a walk. It's the kind of hot that makes you slow, the kind where the air's too arid to feel on your skin but it's heavy. Something presses back at you as you press ahead in the heat. Something pulls you earthward, tugs you toward the ground, toward sleep. It's like gravity got more insistent, like it's putting you in your place. Think what you like, it says. Scale a cliff, climb too high, run yourself breathless, tell yourself you can fly. Truth is, you're a lump of matter like any other, mostly water, gravitationally bound.

The air's so still the aching wail of Joplin carries down the dusty road from somewhere, no trees to block the heartbreak in her voice, no fences to catch at the melody, tangle it up like scraps of a kite. It's the only sound for hours, the only sign of life for miles.

Luna lags, ambling along like a donkey in no great hurry, sniffing every cholla close to the path, every flat paddle of cactus that's pulled away from the body and shriveled down to the skeletal lace of its spines, every prickly pear fruit that's fallen and burst in the heat.

As we round a slight bend in the road - speed limit 10 mph, mostly observed by golf carts; I haven't seen a single car drive through the park since I arrived - the music gets louder, tinny, like an old-school radio, coming from beneath a turquoise beach umbrella outside a single-wide at the corner of Smoketree and Rattlesnake Way.

It's not until I catch sight of the man in the canvas camp chair hidden by the umbrella that I realize I'm whistling along. He looks at Luna, then at me.

He reaches out and turns the radio off.

The silence is everywhere and absolute, arid and vast as the air.

Luna's hot. She stops where she is, panting, blinking lazily at the sun-bleached bones of the desert that sprawls out forever, or at least as far as the mountains a hundred-odd miles to the east.

I scoop her up in one arm and carry her most of the way back, still whistling Bobby McGee.

The Fountain of Youth

It's late in the season for snowbirds. The woman on the phone said, when I called to book a site for spell, that lots of folks had already left. She said she could get me set up nice, at a nice campsite with a patio, if I was sure I didn't want a villa? - ok then, I'll put you at the end of a row, not too far from the bathhouse and laundry and mail room and shuffleboard and bocce ball courts and crafts and poker and billiards rooms and restaurant and market and steam room and all the pools.

Great, I said. Mostly I just need the dog park and the gym. Gotta run myself and the dog a few times a day or else we get squirrelly. I laughed.

She didn't. What kind of dog? she asked.

Chihuahua-ish, I said. More or less.

Yappy? she asked.

The dog? I asked. No.

Bite?

Me? Almost never, I said, then thought, Marya would you shut the fuck up.

She booked the campsite, I paid the bill. A couple days later, Luna and I rolled up in Big Red, the Tramp Scamp in tow.

It was just before sunset. The mountains looked painted in ink on a tangerine sky. Towering palms, their trunks wrapped with string lights, clustered at the grand entrance to the Fountain of Youth RV Park & Spa.

I pulled forward, stopped at the gatehouse, and waited while the woman who'd booked me - I recognized her voice - slowly circled the truck and camper with a clipboard.

She stood by the driver's side window. Machine-beaded earrings, the kind you see at the Genuine Native American Trading Posts that dot the interstate exits across the Southwest, brushed the shoulders of her polo shirt. She sized me up over the top of her glasses for a goodly while.

Where was my truck registered. Where was my camper registered. How come they weren't registered in the same place. What's with the truck's temporary plates. Where was I coming in from. Where was I heading out to. Would I be having any guests, and if so who, and when, and where are they from, and how long did I expect them to stay.

I answered her questions. I signed half a dozen waivers and forms. I didn't get mouthy. I didn't crack a single joke. Finally, she thrust a fistful of brochures and maps through the window at me, shot me a sidelong glance, waved her hand the direction I was supposed to go, and slammed the door of gatehouse in my face.

As I rolled down Rattlesnake toward No Name Lane at a peaceable 8 mph, I wondered what it would be like to believe that it matters even a little, right now, where one stray woman and her dog are coming from or going to, or where they call home if they have one, or why.

What it would be like to believe it's worth the kind of time it takes to make a point of dragging out a meeting at a grandiose locked gate, where one of you decides whether to let the other one in and one of you waits.

What does she think about as she's falling asleep, if by the end of her day she's still got some righteousness left, at least enough to remind a stranger that she's a stranger, to make sure a guest knows she's an unwelcome guest, to keep the gate locked till you've made clear what you want her to hear: You don't belong.

Same as it ever was.

What's it like, I wondered, to fancy yourself the gatekeeper.

What's it like to think you get to judge.

Bombay Beach

People come to the desert, to these scattershot, makeshift towns, for a lot of reasons. But they only stay for two: they have nowhere left to go, or they need to disappear.

The other night, I stood in the shadows - got there late, there weren't any seats - and listened to a group of people talk about rethinking community, and creating alternative economies, and whether and how to weaponize knowledge, and the non-monetized value of art, and vertical farms, and aggregate data, and how to tap and secure the skills and assets of this particular group, and the virtues of this particular group, and whether this particular group should see itself as welcoming and outward-facing or instead become more insular, more self-sufficient, and by the time the talk wrapped up I was in my truck and on my way back to the Fountain of Youth RV Park & Spa, where I drove up to a darkened gatehouse and a closed gate and a sign that said "Gate closed after 10 p.m."

Luna and I sat idling awhile. We tried calling the office - no answer. We tried texting the closest thing we have in the area to friends - out for the evening. The Scamp was set up at the campsite; for once, because we're staying a little longer, I'd even unloaded the go-bag I always keep in the passenger seat of the truck.

I headed for the closest hotel, not quite an hour away.

CA-111

As I drove the winding desert two-lane, I wondered whether anybody else finds it more and more absurd that humans compulsively create and recreate social structures, social strata. We rebuild every hierarchy we tear down. We replicate the systems that have always failed us even as they fail us, we reinforce the destructive power of those systems as they destroy us in real time. We grapple for power in even the smallest and simplest exchange, as if this time it might save us, as if some scrap of social power could be worth something, could even begin to help us now.

I drove past the sign for Slab City, a shifting makeshift community built on what remains of a Marine artillery training range out here in the desert, miles from any service or store, nowhere near water or sewer systems or a power grid. On weekend day trips, tourists drive slowly past the art to gawk at the squalor and take photos of themselves before turning their wheels north and heading for more picturesque locales. Rich kids from Santa Barbara and L.A. make the trek when it's not too hot, set up trailers they don't have to live in, play at poverty for a few weeks or a season, till it gets too hot out, till the idea of living 'off the grid' and 'outside of society' collides with the reality of no electricity, no running water, no one to call when your car wanders off all by its lonesome and reappears some three weeks later and 50 miles south, stripped of its stereo, wires, and tires.

Veterans, elderly people living from month to month, poor and unhoused folks, meth heads and anarchists, artists and runaways - ask the residents and guests of Slab City and they'll tell you it's "the last free place on earth." They, too, have their taxonomies; informally, they segregate themselves into ‘Slabbers’ or ‘Year-Rounders’ and tourists or ‘normies.’ Down the road, in the town of Bombay Beach, a similar schism is everywhere apparent, so sharply delineated it's nearly palpable: stop off at the Ski-Inn, the town's lone business and bar: you'll see the locals down at the end of the bar by the jukebox, keeping an eye on the much younger, much wealthier seasonal crowd that blows in every winter and tumbles out again when the thermometer starts creeping toward 100, 110, 115, come late spring. The locals are tight-jawed and narrow-eyed; the seasonal crowd is moneyed and worldly, tends toward the gauzy, rushes to be effusively kind for an instant, until its attention wanders - the same way it does three hours west, in Hollywood and L.A. - over your shoulder, toward whatever might be just about to come through the door.

Last weekend, I saw a young woman in a sundress posing by her Tesla in front of a cluster of rotted-out, boarded-up trailers on the road to East Jesus.

A mile up the road, at the border patrol checkpoint - I go through a couple times most days - the guards wait till I roll down my window. They see that I'm white and wave me on by.

Some days it takes me a minute to press the gas pedal and move along, because I want to ask them what they're looking for.

I want them to admit it. I want them to say it to my face.

I want someone to tell the fucking truth.

I-8

Thirty or so miles south of the Fountain of Youth, there's roadside motel in a town that's more a wide spot in the road than anything else - there's a gas station that's still open, a gas station that's boarded up and surrounded by wire, a windowless market, and the motel.

I pulled up and left the truck idling, Luna standing up in the driver's seat to keep an eye on me. The door was closed, the lobby was dark, but the open sign was lit, and there was a walk-up window - it could have been a Dairy Queen or Tastee Freez if it wasn't for the bulletproof plexiglass and the speaker, the slot at the bottom too narrow for anything but cards or cash. Not even a hand was gonna get through.

I buzzed the buzzer; after a while I heard a distant thump and scrape. A shaky florescent light in the back room flickered on, a man of indeterminate age emerged, looking somewhat apologetic, as if I'd caught him slacking.

The check-in process was arduous, somehow, and complex - the very old computer was slow, I saw a map of rooms on the screen, there was some kind of discernment process going on about which room or which screen, I wondered if maybe it got full on weekend nights, truckers coming and going, families trying to find a place to stay between towns, couples out on a grand adventure, solitary people out of luck. Finally, he slid papers and a blue Bic pen through the slot, I initialed and signed and slid my ID and credit card back, he took the card and with considerable further difficulty finally charged it, slid me my cards and a key, and told me to drive around to the back, walk through the courtyard, the door would likely jam, don't force the handle, just lift it up and throw my shoulder against the door -

I nodded, not really listening, thanked him, and drove around to the unlit back lot.

There were no other cars. No motorcycles, no trucks. I drove around the motel again - there was one car, blocking the lobby door. It had to be the owner's.

I followed the open-air walkway into the courtyard, lit up by a near-full moon: a silver-washed graveyard of broken patio furniture, overturned buckets, abandoned mops, the odd dusty grill.

I found my room and looked at the door, thinking whether I'd really need to throw my shoulder against it if it stuck.

It didn't. It wasn't locked.

I felt for the switch, flipped on the buzzing florescent light, casting both Luna and me a sallow shade of off-green. She got the zoomies and zoomed in circles while I took off my shoes and looked around.

The bed looked no cleaner than the couch over which someone had stretched a white sheet full of burn holes. The sheet was well made - thick and soft to the touch - but in the end I slept atop the bed, still dressed.

I surfaced from a shallow sleep around two in the morning, put my shoes back on, lay back down, and washed back out.

I've driven by the motel half a dozen times or more since then. I've never seen another car. I check it, clock it, each time I go by, I'm not sure why.

And I'm not sure why I found it so comforting that he never did check my ID.

Los Angeles

There is a current of something that runs through every place in the world. It's always invisible, almost always unspoken; it always takes a while to suss it out, and a longer while to name, if I can ever pin down a name, a way of describing the feel of a place, the something about a place that makes it the way it is. I've said of parts of the west and southwest that some other law holds and is upheld here, invisible and palpably present; I've said there are parts of the country where violence is always just below the surface, always just about to explode. I've said there are regions where a current of despair runs belowground, gets into the water, the wells.

Here in California - and there are a lot of Californias - that current is different. It's less felt sense than hallucination, less real than surreal. It has something to do with fantasy and mythology, with schemes and illusions, ideals and collective delusion, desperation and fever dreams.

California is a terrible idea. California is a half-cocked, cockamamie scheme, it's an impulsive gamble and a con man's dream. It's massive and sprawling, unwieldy, ungovernable, implausibly large. It's an ecological disaster zone, a social experiment that has failed and failed and failed. It's forty days in the desert and the garden of Eden, it's devastating poverty and sickening, toxic wealth, it's built on a fault line, it's always on fire.

California is America writ large and stripped down to its essence. It's America's worst nightmare and the American dream. It's everything America swears it isn't and everything we claim to be.

I've spent a lifetime already trying to put something into words about both this state and this country. I still haven't made a dent, but I've gone too far to turn back and I'm too stubborn to quit. This is where I'm from. It's home. I will never escape California, not for long; I’ll always heed its siren song. No matter where I go, I can't stay gone. I can check out any time I like, but I can never leave.

I showed up in California 51 years ago today. You're gonna have to drag me out by the ankles, I guess, and not until I'm good and done.

For a look at California from another angle - facing north - give last year’s Into the Mystic a read. “As soon as I crossed the state line I remembered, the way you remember the things for which you never had words, the wildness of where I'm from….”

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It is indeed my birthday, friends!

and in celebration of having not yet kicked it, I’m running a Very Merry Unbirthday to You special on paid subscriptions. Nothing on Going Solo at the End of the World is paywalled nor will it be in the future, but if you’ve got some spare change burning a hole in your pocket, a year’s subscription bolsters the efforts of independent writers & buys ’bout half a tank of gas.

As always, the most important thing to me is that you’re here reading, commenting, sharing, clicking that stupid freaking heart - ooo, that reminds me of a story I gotta tell you sometime - and continuing the journey with Luna & me. If you aren’t a free subscriber yet, I’d sure like it if you’d join us for the ride.

xoM