Odds and Ends
It's 105 degrees in San Bernardino today, which means it'll be 120 in Joshua Tree. I saw a middle-aged woman standing at the bus stop on Waterman Street holding an umbrella. It was a quaint image, the way Demeter strolling through Central Park under her parasol seems like an echo of another time. But here, the overwhelming heat constantly reminds you that without the pleasantries of modern life, you would die outside fairly quickly. Lose a house cat and it's likely baked to death in a day or so unless someone takes it in. Even a tiny bit of shade like a parasol is a blessing. I've learned to park my car in the shade whenever possible because doing so means the air conditioning will not dissipate in mere minutes. Back east, if it's a hot day and you leave your car parked at the mall, when you come back, you have to roll down the windows for a while before it's cool enough to get back inside. Here, that's pointless. It's 105 outside. You might as well get in, crank the air conditioner to max and hope for the best.
This is why mass transit is futile in a place like this. No one of any means is going to walk to the bus stop, wait at the bus stop and then walk from the bus stop. I'd sooner walk up 30 flights of stairs than go down to the main drag and take a bus somewhere. I'd be curious to see whether Ralph Nader, if forced to live here, would either.
Today, I braved the 12 block walk down the hill and back to Stater Bros, the local supermarket chain. The hot sun is like a force field to walk through. There was a Mexican gardener with a leaf-blower tending the curbs, and a middle aged African American man carrying two grocery bags who groaned when I said hi in passing. In the heat of the day, a good stretch of the legs here is like an extreme sport.
The point is that only miners, ranchers and geologists are supposed to live here. And now I know why this region's explosive growth coincided with the development of an effective car air conditioner, and why my daughter's car dealership offers no AC cars $4,000 off the sticker price.
My brilliant girl and I have driven around a lot. I really missed her and I'm willing to see a chick flick with her and she's willing to drive me 90 miles to the beach. We're enjoying catching up, and who knows if we'll ever have a chance to do this again. I was telling her how I've begun to dream about rain, the late afternoon deluge that staunches the wound of a hot Brooklyn day, but here would feel like the last scene in Dune.
"I hate the rain. I like the sun. Even though I don't spend much time in it, the sun makes me happy." Her boy friend, who grew up here, hates the ocean and won't use the apartment complex pool, either.
Later, and apropos of nothing, I went off on an old guy rant."Why, when I was a boy, gas-o-line was only 35 cents a gallon. So was a slice of pizza and a subway token." Just out of curiosity, I went to one of my favorite web sites, measuringworth.com, which is one of those things like the Weather Channel that grows in appeal as one gets older. Anyway, 35 cents in 1970 had the purchasing power of $1.82 in today's money, so two bucks for a subway token or a slice of pizza is really equivalent, and a dollar extra for gas, considering all the people we've had to murder to keep prices down, is not a bad deal at all.
If you add in all the money we've spent controlling the Middle East for the last 40 years, then the real price of a gallon of gas is more like eight bucks. But the people here can't see it, they won't see it, because the alternative is to leave the SUV home and take the bus. As Liz and Jason confirm, once living in a place like this becomes normal, the energy goggles never come off.
I was up in Barstow recently. Barstow literally wouldn't exist without transportation. It's a mile high in the San Gabriel mountain range. I've never been in a place where the mountains are completely barren before. If you stand outside your car and look around at the plateau, there is no shade in any direction for 50 miles except what humans bring with them. Until the white folks showed up, no one has ever wanted to get here; they either were the indigenous Indians who got the shitty end of the stick or others who wanted to get through here and not die. No offense, but the Mojave had to have been the wimpiest, most passive Indians ever to accept this place to live, to adapt to a diet of snakes and lizards and endure the punishing heat year after year. I can't imagine getting to Barstow and thinking that this place is a lot better than the place I've just been. Actually, some archaeological evidence suggests human habitation there for 15,000 years, so maybe the place got suckier and suckier over the millennia but so slowly that generational memory was able constantly to recalibrate, ignoring the whiny elder voices saying, "Why, when I was a boy..."
The proposed date for early Mohave inhabitation, by the way, somewhat flummoxes the standard archaeologist theory that there were no humans in North America before the end of the last Ice Age 8,000 years ago, but whatever.
Jedidiah Smith wandered up around Barstow in 1826 and discovered the Old Spanish Trail, actually the old Mojave Indian Trail, actually a dried out river bed. Smith's trail shortened the impossible journey east and west. Shortly, another trail, the old Mormon Trail to Utah, was discovered, so the traders and settlers through the region had two paths to follow and one place to stop, Barstow. In the 1840s, John Fremont and Kit Carson set up a fort to discourage horse stealing and general brigandage.
Then came the Gold Rush. Anyone with a grub stake and a brain would have sailed around the Horn to get to San Francisco, but thousands of poor prospectors like Sam Clemens had to make the passage overland through Jed's river bed. Barstow proper sprang to life in 1870 when the Union Pacific and Santa Fe railroads built a watering stop. It's a long way across the Mojave, through Nevada and Utah before the climate calms down a little, and steam engines need water.
So a few people eked out an existence here, servicing travelers. Fast forward to 1926, when the US decided to build Route 66, the prototype of the modern interstate which really put Barstow on the map. Thus, the Dustbowl refugees like the Joads had to pay a call, and so did every drifter like Kerouac and every deluded dreamer heading to Hollywood. In 1940, Roosevelt was persuaded to create Fort Irwin, a giant training facility for soldiers and Marines nearby. Cha-ching! for the local economy.
I'm grateful to my daughter's boyfriend for this fact, since I couldn't figure out why a town with 20,000 people has 75 motels, 15 bars and a dozen liquor stores. In 1947, Barstow finally incorporated as a city. What passes for history in the town's museum is mostly grainy photographs from early in the 20th century, but most from the 1950s, an old wagon, a model T and a mint Electra Glide motorcycle. Road rallies and off road racing began here.
Modern day Barstow is the home of two giant outlet malls, a magnet for regional shoppers. Gas is 83 cents a gallon more expensive than it is down in the valley, which I gladly paid because the gas gauge on the crappy Cobalt has a tendency to ride at half full and then suddenly reveal that there is actually has less than an eighth of a tank left. I miss the mighty Illinois Sebring.
In the past, I would have fled the desert a week ago. But the mystery of why my daughter is choosing to live her life in this place keeps me driving on the surface streets, talking to people. I need to understand.
Here are some random observations, none conclusive. Left Coast rhymes are whack. I've been stewing about this for a while, every time I put on the car radio in the crappy Cobalt. Rap/Hip hop here seems to be going through its Paul Anka phase. Radio and recorded music work best when the suits have no idea what's going on: "Who is this Elvis?/ They're called the what-les?/ Well then, get me a band from Seattle./ Why are suburban kids buying this Negro music? Wait, now these little shits are selling their music by themselves directly off the internet?"
The only reason you get a Tupac or a Bob Marley once in a while is because the corporate consultants get blind-sided and, for a few years, space opens up for real artists. The suits think this is chaos, because the entertainment behemoths can't control or predict product, project revenues. But suits regroup quickly. Within a few years, they manage to reverse engineer rap-flavored entertainment, and the 12 year-olds of every age buy it as eagerly as they bought NWA.
That's the genius of American Idol. It creates, controls and markets product in theoretically unlimited supply. "Look, it's a CD by that nice girl from American Idol. I like her." In a lowest common denominator market, it can't work any other way. The trick is lowering the denominator on the radio and MTV, or as Lincoln said (and he actually said this, Wendy, look it up), "For people who like this sort of thing, this is exactly the sort of thing they would like."
Listening to the Rap stations in the high desert, you can almost smell the suits with their focus groups picking out the artists, arrangers, lyricists, exactly like sit-coms, energy beverages and presidential candidates. I know how ironic it is for an old white guy to be lamenting the end of songs about cop killing. I simply hate being force-fed a diet of L'il Kim and Brit'ney as much as I hate that every town here has the same fast food joints.
In a larger musical sense, southern California radio, which in the 60s was a wonder of the world, now sorts out on the scan like this: Classic Rock, boomer variety, everything from the Beatles to the Police/ new jack Classic Rock, everything after the Police until Smashing Pumpkins. Hair bands, anyone?/ Country/ Mexican Country/ Christian/ Lite music for tired 25 year-olds/ Hip Hop. Rinse, repeat. Once in a while you can find NPR or a jazz station, or if you're lucky something truly quirky and odd like XYZ's time warp, but back in the 60s, man, LA radio had a lot more quirky, a lot less "the consultants say this playlist will maximize profits." My daughter and her friends hate radio, but until they can afford new cars with the iPod attachments, what is to be done? They listen to what is on, because silence in the high desert is scary.
Back east, it's fairly apparent when you're in the 'hood. My friend Madison Steve and I had long talks about the semiotics of the suburbs, why is house, being the highest up with the most tree cover was the hotel on Boardwalk of his block, but in southern California a newbie like me can't immediately grasp why a block in east LA is more ghetto than a block of the same houses in Escondito. No one is out on the street. But here's a cheat sheet. In the ghetto, people don't wash their cars. The cars have a visible coating of desert film. In the ghetto, there are bars on people's windows. finally, in the ghetto there is no tree cover. As a general rule, the bigger and denser the trees, the richer the neighborhood.
This is not only the 40th anniversary of the summer of love. It's also the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road, a book I briefly considered revisiting until Hofstra staged a marathon reading in front of Hofstra Hall that no one, except me, even stopped to listen to. Kerouac, who helped midwife the counter-culture, has aged badly, worse than the self-absorbed hippies and modern day free spirits he inspired. I realized standing at the foot of the Hof Unispan, that Kerouac ironically destroyed the Whitmanesque experience he was having through the act of writing about it.
I'm sure there are lovely people in San Diego and many fine things. I have now visited twice. San Diego apparently is organized on the theory that a city needs to concentrate all of one thing in one place. All the art, culture, science and history-related items will go into Balboa Park. All the restaurants go into the Gaslight District, etc. San Diego is the envious younger sister of LA, the Jan Brady to LA's Marsha. The plaques on their landmark buildings say things like, "In 1931, a Chinaman built this building, can you believe it? 1931! That's because in 1931, this was Chinatown. Crazy."
I guess it's all relative. Europeans can make fun of New Yorkers because nothing we have is more than 390 years old, and New Yorkers mock southern Californians. I have no problem with San Diego being the city of the new, except new in this context means 1980's new. While we were thinking about other things, America stopped being the country that dreamed big, the kind of big that created Southern California in the 1950s, except when it comes to gadgetry. The iPhone is a seismic event here, but SoCal can't seem to work out bottle recycling. There are no separate bins much less regular pick-ups. Everyone here is expected to drive their bottles and cans down to centers. As Liz said, you save a year of cans and they give you thirty bucks. It doesn't seem worth it.
The surrounding hills are dry as kindling. I had dinner with a couple whose property still shows the scars of a brush fire two years ago, who stuccoed the eaves on their house so it could never burn down in the same way again, when an 85 mph fire storm rolled the dice and burned a house here, two houses there in no pattern. Yet at every major intersection, Mexicans have make-shift booths that sell fireworks. I gather from the ones I visited, that whole families drive north and set up a generic clapboard storefronts in any promising-looking empty space. They sleep in a big tent right beside it. Some towns, like Riverside, have banned fireworks, but what does that mean when you can drive three miles into San Bernardino and get them anyway?
For me, it reenforces the idea that our American imagination has failed. We have become a nation of people in denial about the laws of cause and effect. At some level, even the rednecks out here, and there are a lot of them, know this shit can't continue as it has. But wait a second and you can watch their brains hit the default setting. This shit must continue. What else is possible? San Diego knows its skyscrapers are limited by the fact that this is earthquake country, yet the being-upgraded-as-I-type-this California 10 is built exactly along the San Andreas Fault from Los Angeles to Indios because the fault line tends to produce flat surfaces and natural passes between the mountains.
As we drove home last night, I pointed out to my daughter and her boy friend that using surface streets, we were less than five miles from their house, but going on California 10 we would have to go 15 miles to get to the same place. My theory did not compute. Ask anyone in SoCal for directions from any point A to any point B and it involves a freeway. My reliance on a compass is considered weirdly eccentric. I seem to be the only person here willing to sacrifice speed for distance, and even I drive down to the Cooley Mall every morning to get my coffee and very excellent doughnuts at Ms Donuts because it's such a hassle to carry coffee six blocks. I've become adept at the California roll and the illegal u-turn like everyone else here. Southern Californians are the new Mojave Indians.