Cleaning House in the Woods

Who left the door open?

Is that a stink bug? Centipede? Scorpion? Please don’t make him mad!

Really, how many hours can a person spend vacuuming into the dark crevasses where carpet meets wall? Where dust and decaying insects merge in an aluminum window frame?  Until it’s done, I imagine, since everything looks so fresh when the dead flies have all been removed, though I daresay many an arachnid will go hungry tonight when they discover their anticipated sumptuous feast has been pilfered. 

And they have to be hungry all the time. These little guys work hard. Anyone who has ever heard the sound of natural Velcro ripping when separating the folds of a curtain can appreciate the insane industriousness of these tireless creatures.  Tall condominiums of webbing are demolished in our thoughtless pursuit of cleanliness.

I catch my forehead against a thin strand in flight across the living room. Where is she, this Cristo of the insect world? How does she make those tornado cones of webbing in the windowsill? And when two spiders face off at the site of an unlucky moth’s demise, are they polite?

You gonna eat that?

At least the big one wiped her feet when she waltzed into the kitchen from the back door.

The children playing in the rock room late at night saw her first. We, the adults, were all sipping cocktails on top of the granite boulders outside, watching for falling stars. Big spider in the kitchen, they said. “ I’ll take care of that,” I smiled as I slipped back in through the living room window, thinking “these city kids, how cute that they’re afraid of spiders. “

But, hmmm. Yes, well, they were not exaggerating. Our guest was forced to spend an undignified night in a glass jar (with holes in the lid) until she was identified the next morning by our park ranger neighbor as a harmless female brown tarantula. Delighted that this creatures was now friend, not foe, the kids took turns putting their hands beside her for comparison (she won) as she inched her way to freedom into the weeds. I’m sure she was the talk of several elementary schools that week. “Yeah sure, how big?”

 Not all guests are so harmless.

While sweeping the kitchen floor, I glanced into the office, looked down, back up, and put the broom down. The jar trick wasn’t going to work for this guy. A juvenile Southwestern Rattlesnake is too fast for me. But maybe he’ll leave on his own? If I turn my back and he’s gone, I can’t be sure of which dark cupboard, or which warm comforter, he’s crawled into. Isn’t this a fine pickle? I hated to drag him away from his Upwords Scrabble game; perhaps he was merely trying to improve his vocabulary. And what’s the harm in that? But I had work to do.

A half an hour of dancing with snake placed this young gentleman under a sizable mixing bowl. The tricky part was inserting a thin cutting board underneath quick enough to keep him from escaping. Really, it makes one want to give up house cleaning and move out to yard work. 

Yes, something easy, like emptying the buckets of the rainwater, … only to discover the poor little field mice that found out the hard way they can’t swim. Where is the neighbor’s cat when you need her? Sleeping on the job, or at least on my front porch armchair.

Maybe gardening then: something less confrontational. Let’s see: gloves, pick axe, hat, chainsaw…  and after an exhausting day in the sun moving rocks and brush isn’t it nice to come home to a clean house?

Working on my trucker's tan

Simple directions: Get on I-15 north and drive 5-6 hours. Turn east, half an hour till the freeway ends at the only stop light in Boulder City. Find a motel and a pub and I’ll see you in the morning at the Starbuck’s.

Road trip!

Armed with appetizing accessories in the passenger seat: Motown greatest hits, a bowl of watermelon, sliced raw red peppers, Lightening Hopkins and a Mountain Dew.

East L.A. is home to the golden “firme” oldies of the ‘60s where low rider meets the surf set and everyone just got along, mostly; when R&B was soulful and the drum machine hadn’t been invented. It’s also the birthplace of urban non-sequiturs like the faded oversized plastic palomino on a stick looming over a storage facility.

The trick is to get through Corona in fourth gear. Corona is a vortex in which everyone living in Riverside and L.A. counties are required to pass through twice daily. There are four traffic lanes in each direction and an inside shoulder wide enough there ought to be a commuter lane, but only serves to collect the unfortunate carnage of couches and appliances. Reminds me of that awesome book by Melissa Fay Green, Praying for Sheetrock; about a clandestine community living amongst the pines, surviving on freeway flotsam at a treacherous interstate exchange in Georgia while the local sheriff looked the other way.

 Just as I’m pondering this wide inside freeway space, said space is consumed by a temporary wall and a long field of fill dirt, dotted with earth-movers, not remotely moving. If these are my tax dollars at work, they’re taking an awfully long unauthorized cigarette break because at 3:45 p.m. they are abandonded.

Massive wide loads of what look like tubes for a nuclear plant weave across three of those lanes, with their little parasitic support vehicles buzzing at their heels. I weave through them up and over the Cajon Pass, pounded by winds at Lake Elsinore; the L.A. basin is now just a memory.

As oldies give way to freeway country music on the radio, a sign suggests Barstow.

Yet there is nothing taller than three feet living out here, for hundreds of miles in all directions.

Until an oasis of gas stations appears. The guys flipping advertising arrow signs at the edge of the offramp are from competing gas stations: Arco and Valero. It’s a price war. Only they have the same prices. Two young Russian couples hand roll harsh tobacco looking metro chic outside the Starbuck’s attached to the Arco station.

And in a few more miles: Billboards! Alien Beef Jerky! Now we’re talking. Not sure if this stuff is veggie approved, but we gotta take a peak. And Bun Boy Restaurant and Motel. I wonder how many tweekers it took to think that one up?

 

Farther still, a sign announcing the California Welcome Center. Amen’t I welcome yet? I started in San Diego.

You know you’re in Nevada when castles and blinking lights tower out of the sands like a strange (bad) dream out of a deep subconscious fear of cities. This of course leads to the biggest mirage of all: Las Vegas, at dusk, just enough light to see the necessary exit to high tail it out of there.

Hmmm, wonder how she got that shot?

El Rancho Boulder Motel is three blocks from the Boulder Brewing Company. Through the brewery windows, a hockey game glows on the t.v., behind chairs stacked on the tables, the place having closed a half hour earlier. And the bar next door doesn’t carry BBC beers. Hmmm, there’s a story here.

But the story I came for is water, and how quickly we’re sucking Lake Mead dry. So quickly they’re tunneling underneath it for three miles and putting a third intake pipe there because the other two are already compromised by our rate of consumption and also of evaporation.

I can commiserate about the evaporation. By noon I had gone through two liters of water and two quarts of Gatorade. The sweat is ripped right off your skin, leaving salt ripples. I could attract four-legged animals in a pasture with this skin. Things don’t melt here. Melting implies there’s moisture in the end product. Here it’s more like things are freeze-dried or turned to pillars of salt.

It’s a simple fix really, on the lake. A canvas pool cover. They could employ the local swim teams to pull it across the lake, leaving a few areas open for recreational boats. How hard could that be?

Doing the speed limit headed back south, the desert is mind numbing on this edge of the Mojave National Preserve. This is where the undead of one-hit wonders live freely in perpetuity on the airwaves. Can’t someone put a stake through Supertramp?

 At last, Yermo, and Peggy Sue’s 50s Diner. It must be a requirement that all roadside diners house lost dinosaurs and aliens.

Finally the temperature cools as I travel down through the Cajon Pass, anticipating the spread of humanity again, around that last mountain, to see: there it is… a basin of smog, like a hammer in your psyche. And Corona: second gear. Ah well, it is rush hour.

My skin feels the call of fresh water and a lathering of linden flower lotion. I even treat myself to a stop for fresh basil, escarole and feta cheese for a salad, and splurge $4.99 on a bottle of wine.

Ready for the next road trip! I promise, my next one, maybe. A video.