Night in the High Desert
the journey to Joshua Tree
We made our way down two-lane highways thick with eighteen-wheelers, through the towns of Mojave and Barstow and beyond…
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.
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.