Day 22, Part II: Santa Barbara, California, to Las Vegas, Nevada

Monday 14 October, continued

This is a poem I wrote about 20 years ago, maybe more:

Autobiography

First I was born, then developed

a propensity for climbing

on rocks, furniture, jungle

gyms, and walking on walls

and fences.

Then there’s water.  Force only

restrains me.  Robert says, “You like

to be high, and wet.”

Just before sunrise,

coming home down

hill, I flew

like an angel but

an angel still apprentice.

Indeed, then there’s water.  I used to bellydance, in my 20s and 30s, and one solstice or equinox or something a few of my dance friends needed someone to fill in for a temporarily unavailable troupe member as they performed an improvisational, four-part tribute to the elements.  They thought I was the logical choice to dance fire.  I thought they were bonkers.

Fire?  Me?  Earth, okay – I think my astrological sign is an earth sign, and I’m content at rest.  Air, obviously not.  Air is for creative, dreamy types.  Fire is passion and impulse and spontaneity, and I danced the piece (to Peter Gabriel’s‘The Feeling Begins’) with only moderate conviction, after a week or two of striving to get in touch with my fiery side, which was, as usual, screening calls.  Water is my favorite element.  Sensitivity, imagination, a willingness to go over, under, around and through to get where I think I should be (not enough sensitivity or imagination to figure out where I really should be, at least for the first few decades).  Plus, of course, an abiding love of getting wet.

Many writers and thinkers liken the ocean, and water more generally, to the womb.  For me, as much as almost any body of water feels nurturing, that sense of being uplifted and sustained is more about revivification than retreat.  Swimming, floating, turning pencil rolls, treading water and diving are liberating activities for me; I feel freed, and emerge refreshed.  There is nothing physically freeing about water, though, that I can think.  It takes away some of the weight of one’s body, but it’s much heavier to push against, or through, than air is.  Gravity remains in force in water, and buoyancy is very much in force for persons of my figure type.  Humans absolutely cannot breathe in it, and asphyxiation is a long way from liberation.

Nonetheless, water generally and the ocean especially have always seemed welcoming, warm, benevolent forces to me.  I know they can be deadly.  When I was a very little girl, maybe three or four, a neighbor kid died at the beach where I played, drowned in an unexpected undertow.  My parents declined to bring their children to the funeral, but Kevin’s death made an impact.  Several years later, Jaws came out, and I had no interest in seeing it.  I could imagine every chomp, even while swimming in a reservoir in college.  If you did see that movie, and you ever got into so much as a hot tub again in your life, you have my deepest respect.  More bad-water memories:  the blizzard of ’78 washed away houses and one grandad in my hometown; my little brother almost drowned in our backyard fishpond as a toddler (I, 18 months older, held him up by his overall straps and hollered for Mum); my first dog, old and blind, died in that same fishpond on a cold February night, and I hauled her dead body out from among the ice chunks, and wept over it on my knees in the snow and the mud.

Santa Barbara

Gold Beach

Respect, absolutely.  But also an abiding comfort.  Lakes, rivers, beaches are often pretty, more often beautiful, sometimes fierce.  However, they have yet to evoke the terror implicit to me in fire, nor the awe of hurricane winds.  The idea of landslides and avalanches scares me more than the thought of floods and tidal waves.  So when the waves at Gold Beach knock me down and try to send my struggling body and eventual corpse out to the deep-water scavengers, I’m not 100% confident I’ll prevail, but I’m delighted to try.  And when I get out safely (though bruised around the soles of the feet), I don’t go back in.  Warm and benevolent, sure, but not necessarily all the time and everywhere.

San Simeon, California

Also Gold Beach

And when I say ‘warm,’ obviously I mean it in the emotional sense.  Another of water’s physical properties is that in nature it’s usually chilly at best, unless you’re close to or within the tropical zone, and I rarely am.  Even in Santa Barbara, an earthly paradise, the ocean in October is refreshingly brisk.  The temperature reminds me of the North Atlantic, near Boston, in July and August.  When I was young, I never sunbathed to get tan, I did it to get hot enough that I could endure 30 minutes or so in the surf.

Pointing the car east, toward the desert, I’m astonished at myself.  There’s some kind of ghost pain around my torso as I tear myself from the ocean.  Even the knowledge that I’m heading toward the Mighty Mo can’t make sense of this decision.

Decision made and executed, though – and if you read through that long screed on me and water, thanks and sorry.   Just a little bit inland, the residential zone ends and agriculture begins again.  There was a smell of potatoes to me, and fields of something that looked like potatoes.  But there can’t be potatoes here, right?  They want to be cooler and wetter than here.  There were also large fields of little, short trees that I’m fairly certain grow lemons.  The fields, I noticed, though very large indeed, were not vast like the Illinois and Iowa cornfields.  That was somewhat comforting, like the balance of nature is being better safeguarded here.

And I must safeguard my transport, so stopped for gas and a chance to sponge away the coast-related schmutz.  I still don’t know what that film on the glass was.  I don’t know whether this is a sign of approaching desert, but in hot, dry, windy Santa Paula, California, the windshield-washing fluid dried before I could turn the squeege around.  Working super-quickly, I got the job done.  I chatted briefly with the clerk who gave me my receipt; she suggested it was unusually hot and dry.  She also liked my earrings so much I wound up taking out one of them for her to look at it more closely.  Glass and copper, we decided.  Very nice indeed.  (They were a gift.)

The California freeway system is slightly mysterious to me.  For one thing, every few miles it seemed like the freeway either ended or began again.  Why?  Nothing seemed to change, except that a sign appeared stating, “Freeway ends,” or “Freeway begins.”  And another thing, State of California:  65mph speed limits + traffic lights = bad mix.  Just when I started getting snarky, though, I would pass another CHP officer memorial sign.  There are way too many police killed in the line of duty.

Shortly after Santa Paula, the scenery shifted somewhat, so the great verdant fields were spreading at the feet of big, bare, brown hills.  Later, there were just the hills, with an occasional industrial building perched on a hill, or something looking like a research-facility.  Very rarely there’s a house.  Somewhat less rarely, there would be a cluster of houses and shops, low on the hills.  I think of California as crowded, but it is emphatically low-density around here.

Main Street (freeway? maybe), Pearblossom

Pearblossom, California, has a population of 2,435 according to its freeway sign.  (Or maybe just road sign.  Who knows?)  I find it hard to imagine pears blossoming in this dry, stark place; it looks like real desert to me.  As I typed this, weeks later, I realized maybe the name comes from prickly pear cacti.  That would make much more sense than the kind of pears most familiar to me.  Perspective shift.  The town, according to another sign, is about 2,000 feet above sea level, and the mountains on the horizon show patches of white.

There’s a sign for a Devil’s Punch Bowl Park outside Pearblossom, and at the park, managed by L.A. County, there are about half-a-dozen signs warning visitors about heat stroke, exhaustion, burned dog paws, falling (“steep rocks and cliffs”), break-ins and deer in the road.  My favorite is the one that advocates providing our friends the rattlesnakes “respect and distance.”  There is no warning about not hugging cacti.  Maybe no one really does that.

I have got to learn about depth-of-field.  This is a photo of a deep ravine.

Ranger station taxidermy

The ranger on duty seemed eager to chat.  Apparently most visitors don’t come into her station, though it’s full of information and alarming wildlife, both live (mostly snakes) and stuffed.  She is another military kid, spent time in Arizona or New Mexico, and wound up here.  She ‘paints the desert,’ and one of her pieces hangs above her workstation.  My hazy memory is that it was a watercolor; my entirely accurate memory is that I thought it excellent.  She also suggested that, if I had time, I should stick around for a while.  Apparently, anyone hanging out by the picnic area as the sun begins its descent (or the earth continues its rotation) has a good chance of seeing a desert fox come to raid the trash cans.

The desert at sunset

I didn’t wait for the foxes, though the park also offers fantastic views of a deep ravine, and under other circumstances I would have been happy to stare for hours.  But I had a hotel reservation lined up in Vegas...  Between the dearth of signs or landmarks and the constant crackling of many fat utility lines overhead, I feel like I was lucky to make it out of Pearblossom.  But I did, and the ground starting rising – 3,000 feet, per the roadsigns, 4,000 feet.  Literally touching the California border, there’s a small and brightly-lit complex of hotels, gas stations, restaurants and casinos.  Not too many miles further, there’s Las Vegas – and oh, how I longed for Pearblossom.

The desert at night

About ten years ago, I was vacationing in Amsterdam, and went to an Indonesian restaurant for dinner.  The couple next to me struck up a conversation with the couple next to them, and I, in the not-entirely-honorable tradition of solo travelers, eavesdropped.  Couple One was an English man and an English woman.  Couple Two was a Dutch woman and a mixed-nationalities man.  They discussed their travels in Europe (both) and Asia (Couple Two), and then Couple Two asked about the Americas.  Couple One said oh, yes, they’d been to America, and they really would not recommend it.  It is not a very nice place.  Very cheap, very touristy.  They had been to Las Vegas for a week a few years ago, and they had not liked America at all.

Y’know, if I ever overhear that conversation again, I shan’t sit by, snickering quietly.

After three weeks of mostly quiet places, mostly rural environments, time in tundra and prairies and oceans, Las Vegas was a body slam to the mat.  Every sense, every thought, every nerve was curling up and trying to find somewhere to hide.  I didn’t gasp in awe or snicker in disbelief, I just thought, ‘What?  Why?  How the... Where am I?’

Not very nice.  Gaudy, in fact.

Have you ever been?  It is deranged – a city on hallucinogens.  Entering at night, when all the neon is cycling through its millions of miles of tubes, must be a joyous experience for some people.  I used to work with a woman who vacationed in Las Vegas, not to gamble, but to walk around and look at everything.  She thought it was cool.  She was right, it is cool; but in way too aggressive, indulgent and wasteful a way for my taste.  But it’s a great shock treatment for a psyche in repose.