REFLECTION, RUMINATION & RHETORIC FROM THE ROAD: DEATH VALLEY DAYS
Pahrumped, Vegas'd, Bouldered, Twentynine Palmed & Van Stein'd
Due to an unprecedented heatwave, the temperature in Death Valley may soon surpass 130 degrees Fahrenheit.
Which makes today a timely moment to post about a road trip I undertook nine years ago to a California desert known as “the hottest place on earth.”
Two days after returning home from Big Sur I take off with the artist Van Stein to view a full blood moon and total lunar eclipse from the low desert, where the sky is wide and offers crystalline clarity.
A few hours after hitting the road our first taste of bright, barren and dry is Mojave, a town whose name should be changed to Fast-Food-and-Gasland because, well, that’s all it really is.
Before reaching Indian Wells we cut onto 178, a road less traveled: Certainly, we are its only travelers this cool (for the desert) spring day cruising through Trona, an old mining town (Borax) based around a chemical plant known as The Pit (for good reason). We vow never to return, for any reason.
The road upon entering Death Valley, 282 feet below sea level, is long and it features nature at its most stark with dips and curves and sagebrush.
There are two locations for overnight stays in this hellhole: Stovepipe Wells and Furnace Creek. We, of course, have reservations in neither.
Stovepipe is bustling. But its motel rooms are small and sparse and its saloon large and drab, so we agree to remain in motion (an oxymoron?) amid gusty or gutsy winds blowing 25 miles an hour. Thirty minutes later we roll into Furnace Creek, a somewhat more attractive oasis with a ranch offering a long queue to check in.
“Oh shit,” I say to Van Stein, studying my smart phone while in line. “This place has bed bugs. We need the Inn.”
“Where’s that?”
“Up a hill,” says a man in front of us. “But you need to book months in advance.”
Pishaw!
We climb back into our vehicle and careen upward towards a castle on a hill that lords over ranch and desert with a price tag associated with lording over. But our problem this moment is availability, not cost.
A tall, lanky gent greets us. “Checking in?”
“Hope so. Got any rooms?”
“No reservation?” This baffles him. He shakes his head in disbelief of our audacity while consulting a computer screen, then seems slightly astonished by what he sees. “I’ve got two rooms.” He looks up. “A family just cancelled, last minute.” He eyes us. “Five hundred and 20 dollars a room.”
“They must be friggin’ great rooms,” I say.
“No. Just normal rooms. And just the two.”
“Can we see them?”
We trudge a quarter mile. He keys open a door. Reminds me of where I once stayed in Jerome, Arizona, if somewhat less charming at four times the price. (Folks overnighting in Death Valley are a captive audience.)
“Other one’s exactly the same but with a balcony,” he says, “one floor down,”
We don’t have much choice at this point without kicking fate in the teeth. Even Van Stein, for whom this is a large chunk of change, knows we’ve got no choice but to bite his big-ticket bullet.
“Triple-A discount?”
“No, but I’ll see what I can do.” By the time we return to reception he’s decided he likes the cut of our jib. “Tell you what I’ll do.” He scribbles on a notepad like a car salesman, holds it up: $400.
“Done.”
He says to me, “Now he can paint and you can write.”
Van Stein scratches his head. “How’d you know I’m an artist and he’s a writer?”
The guy shrugs, a puzzled expression. “I don’t know.”
Luna, the Goddess of Chariots, is clearly at work this day, ensuring we are where we’re supposed to be.
The artist and I regroup at the bar, a long Bombay Sapphire of a gin martini moment before positioning ourselves on the patio, the sun almost ready to set while everyone else is eating inside.
“Can you imagine,” I say to Van Stein, “coming all the way to Death Valley and sitting in that drab restaurant when you can sit out here and look at the desert floor at dusk?”
A Bulgarian waitress takes my order for a rib-eye steak with garlic mashed and spinach; Van Stein decides to starve himself given the high cost of his room.
Dusk turns to night. A first star appears, followed by a second. And soon many more come out to play, including the constellation Orion.
And then an almost full blood moon begins its rise, illuminating the eerily silent desert night
Van Stein skedaddles to paint; I content myself with a glass of hearty cabernet before bed, enjoying the silence, God’s voice.
I awaken at 12:23 a.m. to a furious wind rattling my window, blowing my curtains. A fitful doze follows until 1:53 when I sense a presence in the room. I sit up and discern an elderly ghost with long gray hair in a ponytail sitting in a chair and smoking something. So now I’m wide awake and realize the only solution for sleep is half-a-Xanax, not because I’m spooked by an old hippie ghost but because I crave slumber. This puts me down and one blink later I awaken to witness the desert at dawn followed by a sunrise reflection cresting the Sierras.
Over breakfast Van Stein and I reason there’s no point to repeat this experience a second night, let’s roll to Pahrump, which I’d been meaning to visit at Pietzke’s suggestion.
We loop through The Badlands, a lunar-like landscape untouched for millions of years…
…and roll into Amargosa, a word that has no meaning in any language and may be the most surreal place I’ve ever visited (and I’ve visited some very surreal places). An old children’s swing-set without swings sets the tone.
Amargosa’s backstory: While driving through this ghost town a ballet dancer/artist named Marta Becket got a flat tire after which she experienced an epiphany (or a delusion) that she should buy the town and recreate it as an installation to herself, bring culture to a town devoid of almost everything else.
Which means it is now a ghost town with herself as one of its four living ghosts.
Marta, it transpires, personifies what Van Stein and I had been searching for during our seven-year Surreal Bounce odd-yssey: The very fine line that exists between creativity and madness. It is clear Marta has toed that line, literally, for decades.
The Amargosa Hotel (which belongs to Marta) is open for business. But there isn’t any. Or anyone. Inside I find a kitschy time capsule with a heebie-jeebie-inducing barn-meets-junk-store odor. Van Stein skips around like a desert jackrabbit while I weave about, hair askew because I forgot to pack my hairbrush.
Onward to Pahrump, which looks exactly like its name. Or, as explained to Van Stein in a text from a friend who used to live there: It’s a shithole trailer town with a Walmart.
This is unfair. To shitholes and trailer towns, screw Walmart.
In a matter of seconds I conclude that I will not be spending a night in Pahrump, or even much of the day, or will ever return in this life, or in any other future reincarnation.
Van Stein, conversely, sees beauty in ugliness, and therefore begs to differ.
But I’m adamant. “Let’s go to Boulder City,” I say. “Other side of Vegas. Supposed to be nice.”
“Ah. You only like nice?”
“In this case, it’s what I don’t like.”
“And what’s that?”
“Tacky. Classless. Bedbugs.”
We stop only as long as it takes to refuel and pick up some jerky and chocolate for the road—and then its Piss off Pahrump.
Far ahead in the distance: Las Vegas, with no plan, on our part, to get any nearer to it than absolutely necessary.
Vegas, however, has other ideas.
Although we intend to circumvent Sin City on a road that, according to Google Maps, is supposed to connect to the one we’re on and take us around and out, we discover to our horror no such connection truly exists and we have no choice but to exit onto Frank Sinatra Drive, which lands us smack in the middle of New York, New York (along with and NYC traffic).
I’m driving; Van Stein is supposedly navigating.
“How the hell did that happen?” I holler, somewhat frazzled and on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“Not my fault.” Van Stein shakes his head. “There was no fork.”
“Yes there is. We’re forked.”
Vegas sucks you in, and then you’ve got to work hard to get shat out through the bowels of the city: urban sprawl, which goes on for miles and miles and miles with traffic lights at every intersection turning red just as you approach and staying red for seven minutes to hold you captive, unless you turn around and head back to the Strip, in which case the lights all turn green and usher you back in to Casino-ville.
It takes time and patience to stick with red—not black, odd or even—but we loosen Sin City’s iron grip and roll toward to Boulder City, originally created to house the laborers who built Hoover Dam.
We pull into little more than a look-see-for-an-hour kind of place, take a peek at Lake Mead, which is turning into a pond.
We even try to engage the locals there but no one seems to know nothing about anything. You ask them about the most prominent landmark in town (aside from Hoover Dam) and they do a blank. If they know, they’re not saying.
“It’s a desert-rat thing,” mutters Van Stein.
“You mean, like, over time desert dryness dehydrates brains?”
The artist nods dryly.
Over a pie at Tony’s Pizza I clack away at Safari to assess options, because it’s clear to me we’re not staying here. “We could go to Bullhead City,” I say, “and if that sucks, as I expect it will given my experience with Nevada casino resorts, we can keep going to Lake Havasu.”
“London Bridge,” says Van Stein.
That sours it for me. “London Bridge belongs in London, not on a man-made lake. Anyway, the moron who bought it thought he was buying Tower Bridge.”
Depression sets in, Van Stein behind the wheel, me navigating.
Sometime later, he says, “Hey, wasn’t that our exit for the road to Bullhead City?”
“No, keep driving.”
“I’m sure it was.”
“Okay, it was. But we’re not going there.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s going to suck. We need to keep going.”
“To Lake Havasu?”
“No, not there either. That’ll suck too.”
“Then where?”
Understand, we’ve been driving for over five hours, a destination nowhere in sight, yet we know we’ve got to be fresh—and in the desert—for a full moon and lunar eclipse.
“If we stay on this road and cut right on I-40 then get off and head south, we’ll be at Joshua Tree National Park, supposedly the best place in California for sky gazing. There’s a town there called Twentynine Palms. That’s where we’re going.”
Van Stein shrugs, resigned to the road—certainly a few more hours of it.
From a couple miles away, Twenyynine Palms looks unwelcoming. But once we arrive… it’s even worse. No charm, no style, just another stretch of urban sprawl and strip malls with fast food shacks.
“Maybe we can find a Travelodge,” says Van Stein.
“Are you nuts? I’m not staying in a Travelodge. In fact, I’m not staying anywhere in this town.”
“But it was your idea!”
“And I admit, I was wrong. I can’t stay anywhere that doesn’t at least have a Starbucks.”
“I bet there’s a Starbucks here.”
“Wouldn’t matter.”
“But you just said…”
“Look, if you can find a Starbucks here, I’ll reconsider.”
Not three blocks later, Van Stein points, cackles with delight and zips into a Starbuckies parking lot.
“I’m still not staying here.”
“Then where?”
“Desert Hot Springs. It’s only 20 minutes away and it’ll be better for your painting tonight.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because there are no mountains east of this place. In Desert Hot Springs the moon will rise over the mountains.
“I don’t need mountains.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m still not staying here.”
“Well I need coffee if I have to keep driving.”
Starbucks obliges and we set off again with me behind the wheel, almost five o’clock. We slip through Morongo Valley, a left into Desert Hot Springs. No charm, no style, just another stretch of urban sprawl, strip malls and fast food shacks.
“I’m not staying here,” I say.
“But look,” says Van Stein. “A nice hotel.” He points at Acqua Soleil and Mineral Water Spa.
In truth, it doesn’t look too bad. But it’s in the middle of urban sprawl, about which I’m phobic. “Nope.”
“The only place left is Palm Springs,” says Van Stein. “And I hate Palm Springs.”
“I don’t care for it either,” I say. “But it’s all we got left.”
“Lets just drive back to Santa Barbara.”
“Okay, if that’s what you want. But first let’s grab a beer at Melvyn’s.”
Van Stein navigates down North Canyon Drive. On the right I notice a tall structure, maybe six floors, pyramid style, facing east. It’s a Hyatt, I discern, smack in the middle of everything. We keep going to West Ramon, cut a right—Melvyn’s.
The ambience inside is as funereal as our mutual mood. We share a Heineken. Van Stein is weary—and bummed. “What now?”
“I’ve got it figured. Trust me.”
We’ve been on the road since 8:30 and thus far gotten Pahrumped, Vegas’d, Bouldered and 29 Palmed. All Van Stein wants at this point is to get sprung from Palm Springs—and now he’s supposed to trust me.
Our beer drained, I climb behind the wheel and steer us back to the Hyatt I’d noted earlier.
“We need two rooms,” I boldly announce to reception, “and one of them’s gotta be on your top floor facing east—okay?”
She clacks her keyboard. “Yes, I can do that.”
“And I need your super-duper Triple-A extra-special price,” I say in deference to Van Stein’s wallet.
“A hundred seventy-nine dollars,” she says,
“Ya see?” I say to Van Stein, who’s rearing up behind me. “Ya gotta trust Luna, our Goddess.”
We can barely believe it. One moment, screwed, Van Stein believing he’ll have to spend hundreds of dollars and still not have a decent vantage point for painting the full moon getting eclipsed; next moment, a sixth floor view for under two hundred buckaroonies.
It gets better: Turns out these are junior suites with balconies.
Downstairs, 20 minutes later, Crystal the concierge points us to 360 North for refreshment: a martini, BBQ ribs and tuna tartare in the open air followed by a stroll to a shop called Wine and Cigar, which is precisely what we want, in that order. Its proprietor allows us to sample several bottles until we decide on a hearty pinot noir. He then recommends a mild smoke from Costa Rica, snips and sizzles—and moments later we are lounging on the front patio and watching the moon commence its rise amid a swirl of gaiety this cool desert evening.
“Could you have imagined this day would end up so well?” I ask.
“I thought you were blowing smoke,” says Van Stein. “And now you really are.”
A few of the natives join us in conversation and I am giddy with road fever, nicotine and alcohol as the full moon continues its rise.
At half-ten, the first flicker of an eclipse shadows the moon’s edge. That’s our cue to scramble back to the Hyatt so Van Stein can paint from his balcony.
By midnight, the moon is almost completely shadowed into a shade of blood orange.
Across the street a bar pulsates with raw energy and loud music. No matter to me. I don’t even bother closing the sliding doors to shut out the noise but fall deeply into slumber and remain comatose until what feels like a split second but is actually six hours when a hot and fiery sun breaks from behind distant mountains.
Postscript: We all know that artists can be somewhat temperamental. Van Stein would not speak to me for nine months after this trip! (The desert can affect people in strange ways.)
And we also know the old karmic adage what goes around comes around.
Or as Thomas Moore writes in The Eloquence of Silence: When a relationship gets rusty, “the Zen spirit involves letting go of things that are no longer worth your effort.”