Night in the High Desert

the journey to Joshua Tree

the desert in the evening

We made our way down two-lane highways thick with eighteen-wheelers, through the towns of Mojave and Barstow and beyond…

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We turned off onto a dirt road deep in the California desert at 5:47 p.m. on a Monday in November. It might as well have been midnight. The moon was barely visible, there were no street signs, and our car did not take kindly to the bumps and ruts in the road. This was a job for a Jeep, it turned out, but ours was no longer with us.

A longish aside: We had driven that old Jeep as far as it would amicably go, more than a hundred thousand miles. We had taken it across the country and back again a few times, and once over Donner Pass in a blizzard, and once through the great salt flats under the moonlight at midnight, and at the turn of the millennium through Wyoming, trucking alongside a field of bison. But mostly we had driven it up and down the hills of San Francisco, hundreds of trips up and down the Great Highway (a pleasure now permanently lost to future generations), and out across the smooth belt of 280 in the gentle shadow of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

view from our porch

The Jeep had been a trusty vehicle, if not a luxurious one. It had transported writers of every stripe, our son and his friends, Little League equipment and children’s golf clubs, many Christmas trees, and enough groceries to sustain a family of three for more than a decade. But it would not take us across the high desert, down the kind of hostile dirt road the Jeep was made for. No, for that we would use our city car, because we had sold the Jeep some years ago to a motorcycle mechanic who promised to care for it well and keep it going forever, eternity being the province of a certain kind of vehicle: the 1998 Jeep Cherokee.

Now, in the aforementioned city car, we crawled from one dirt road to another, looking for signs and symbols, but the only signs we saw announced No Trespassing. This was not friendly country. Eventually we pulled into a rocky roundabout in front of a compound. I got out of the car, looking for an address. There was no address, but they too had a no trespassing sign. I imagined they also had guns. That was the vibe.

Back in the passenger seat, I said to my husband, “I think we missed our turn.”

Nine hours earlier, we had left the Bay Area in an unusual downpour. Despite the rain it was mostly easy going through the Central Valley—where roadsigns advertised “20 avocados for $1”—all the way to Bakersfield. Just east of town we stopped at The Big Red Barn for lunch. Should you find yourself in the general vicinity on Highway 58, it’s worth a stop for the oakie pies. Though Bakersfield isn’t the desert, the oakie pie, which tastes much better than it looks, is all done up in desert colors. They were just out of veggies, so I “settled” for a side of Mac and cheese. We finished with a chocolate chip cookie the size of a pancake.

Oakie pies at the Big Red Barn, Bakersfield

Thus sated we made our way the remaining three and a half hours to our destination, down two-lane highways thick with eighteen-wheelers, through the towns of Mojave and Barstow and beyond. In the Lucerne Valley, surrounded by miles of empty space, we passed the New Beginnings Mobile Home Park. It seemed a dim location for a beginning of any kind—there were no restaurants or shops here, no signs of life beyond the miles of telephone poles and a solitary man, dressed all in black, trudging westward with no backpack—but if one wanted to disappear for a while, this could be the place.

There is a vagueness to a desert road one does not feel elsewhere, a kind of overwhelming sameness of color and shape. Which made it all the more exciting when the long, straight road took a surprising dip, sending the car swooping downward and up again like a gentle roller coaster.

At one point a big brown ball lifted from the roadside in the wind and rolled across the road in front of us. I had seen my first tumbleweed, and now I knew why they called it that. Up ahead I spied something ominous. “Is that a dust storm?” I asked my husband, who is cooler than I under geological and weather-related pressures.

“It’s just dust,” he said. “It’s the desert. There is dust here.”

That man has spent a quarter century calming my nerves, assuring me there is nothing to worry about. My nerves have been frayed of late, and the trip provided a different focus, a welcome distraction. On the days leading up to our departure, I regaled my husband with tragic stories of hikers who succumbed to the desert. Mostly they did not bring enough water. “You always need more water than you think,” I said. “Much, much more.”

How many times did he remind me that in the wayback he had packed tap water, sparkling water, flavored water, and caffeinated water? We had water in insulated metal bottles, and water in cans. We even had water in plastic should we find ourselves in a pinch, or if the car itself should become parched on some forbidden highway far from civilization. We were a traveling Bubba Gump circus of water, he said. We would be fine. I thought of a writer I once visited in his final years in an elderly care home in New Hampshire, how he armed himself with three flashlights before we left his room to dine in the cafeteria, and he insisted that I carry three flashlights as well, though the halls were well-lit and the path was straight. Ever since, when I find myself being singularly obsessed, I think of the writer and his flashlights, and I wonder what my flashlight will be, when I get there. (Maybe I already did get there, and it’s water.)

Now, my fear of dehydration had momentarily given way to the specter of a storm comprised wholly of dirt. I wondered aloud if we would be required to drive through the dust storm. I hoped it would dissipate before we arrived there, five miles or so down the road. (I shot the below video of a dust devil on the way home—in the desert, dust comes in many forms).

I watched and waited. The swirling clouds of dust settled. We kept driving. Nothing looked alive. If Northern California is brownish, desert California is brown. Period. The sun went down. The big trucks barreled along before and behind us. Here and there a sea of lights would appear in the flatness of the desert landscape. We searched for a road sign to lead us deeper into the desert, and eventually we found it, and from there we took a dirt road, and another, and another, until we reached the unwelcoming compound and turned ourselves around, searching for the oasis we’d rented on airbnb, the one that looked so pretty in the pictures.

the aftermath of a rogue Sicilian snowstorm, unfiltered

When you get to a certain age, every trip reminds you of some other trip, and every road looks familiar, no matter how far it may be from any other place you have ever been. Driving those dirt roads into the desert, we both thought of an April in Sicily, when we drove our rented car over rutted dirt roads in a sudden spring blizzard. Sicily in spring was colder and more barren than we expected. The desert was colder, too, and just as barren as one imagines.

“You’ll love it in the morning,” my husband assured me. “Just wait and see.”

to be continued…