A quick note: Dispatches are typically observations from places on the road. Getting a feel for a place is just as important to me as recorded history, facts, and all that. To investigate what Lucy Lippard called “the lure of the local” one must be, well, local.
I plot-twisted the shit out of myself last week.
I can see why Carlos Castañeda decided to check his soul out in the desert; I too fantasize about being able to hear and translate saguaros, but on this trip, I didn’t need drugs to get to the frayed edges of my limits.
Driving through the Mojave alone for a week is akin to taking mushrooms. Add a borrowed dog to the mix and it gets even stranger. Her needs and my needs collapsed onto each other in the car. Her whine while she yearned out the back window became the sound of my own restlessness while waiting for another rest stop, a roadside motel that didn’t look dangerous, a spigot for potable water. A hero’s journey filled by fool’s errands.
Wide open spaces are where I center myself but have also felt the most afraid. The first time I left home at 18, I drove straight into mountains—the Eastern Sierras. It’s either a sense memory or a trained response that pulls any memory from Tulare County to mind while I’m driving; the smell of oranges, looking to the edge of the road driving in zero visibility, pushing through high winds, the sudden scent of manzanita when you hit the tree line, the way the air changes between elevations, the cursive on the Desert Cities bridges.
Tombstone, a famous ghost town known for its violence and now, its historic reenactments, was flat and exquisitely boring with an influx of elderly drivers and reckless drifters both. I was the latter and this is where I paid for my sins. At the bottom of the mountain, the basin was near freezing in temperature, the fog was thick, the rain was hard. The asphalt smelled like maple syrup, the expressway ran along the length of the sheriff’s headquarters and the prison complex. I think a lot about safety. This essay by Valeria Luiselli, is my favorite I’ve read. I held no true interest for Tombstone and I think Luiselli covers it with brilliance and insight I couldn’t add.
I parked in the driveway of the prison waiting for a tow truck with my sweater tied around my head. There were more jonquil weeds growing on the prison side of the road. Plus I try not to interact with sheriffs. I was taught to be un-conditionally hospitable to people passing through, but to have boundaries, to protect myself. To welcome strangers, to never regret kindness, to be generous, and to look out for people who need help and to know the difference between them and scammers. The latter is more difficult but when it becomes apparent that someone may hurt you, or that you feel they could because you’re unaccustomed to the local code. I consider the space between my need for safety versus staying open to experience.
In the parking lots of gas stations, the principles of my ethics bump up against a fear I feel in my body. More primary, I was raised by a man who rescued people for a living then left because he had to rescue himself but not his best friend who drowned while my father continued to live. My brother and I can walk into a room and case the joint: I locate the windows and if they have screws and are the studs load-bearing? Are the screens secured and where are the exits and how high are the windows? As kids, my brother would check the acoustics of a room by making a tiny “boop” sound. He has a memory of me teaching him about carpet that I don’t remember. How sound was absorbed in different environments. These rituals carry into solo traveling. I shine my flashlight into alarm clocks and double check screen-locks. I’m very choosy who I disclose to. Gas stations are my third spaces where my comfort food is shitty coffee from AMPM and whichever Mexican candy the station offers. How do you measure intuition against what you’ve learned so far? What or who can you trust if not your own wits? Road research routinely puts me at the mercy of the kindness of strangers and I’m among the privileged. My drift is part-necessity leftover from the onset of the pandemic; the rest is elective. So now what?
John Goodman performing “People Like Us” from David Byrne’s 1986 film True Stories. A favorite driving jam, I only dislike the lyrics about not wanting freedom or justice (I want both those things in supply please, tacos + roses), the rest I co-sign. People like us, who will answer the telephone.
At the Red Roof Motel in Blythe, the parking lot is filled with semi-truck trailers. An empty field with palm trees creates an ominous low whistle while the dog smells the grass after spotting a baby wildcat in the dumpster. (They don’t call ‘em the Blythe Bobcats for nothin’!) At the stoplight before the onramp to the expressway, a man in a suit knocks on my window to tell me my car is smoking. I pull off the road and make some phone calls. The night ended with a bath and a nightmare so vivid I woke up weeping.
Over the phone, Mark at Mark & Larry’s Shop attached to the Shell station asked if I tried YouTubing it after I used the words “coolant system” and “radiator hose clamps” as coached by my friend over the phone. “There’s nothing worse than paying a dude to talk down to you and then overcharge you for being a woman who may not know cars,” the woman at the hotel counter said, handing me a screwdriver. I tightened every clamp in the engine, checked every leak, spent hours with my head under the hood of my truck like I knew what I was doing. The staff kept checking on me and offered me tools. “Have you tried YouTubing it?”
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