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.