So I'm backpacking cross-country with two best friends I've known since high school, Andrea O (as she will be referred to as until she decides what she would rather change her name to) and Leslie "the" Hammer. We are on a somewhat meandering, uncharted course, aiming for expirience above expidience, although all three of us are here for differant reasons:
Leslie has some time off and wants to visit her brother in Colorado and her family in Pheonix, but has to head back west to California soon, so our paths will split once we head for Texas and she for Denver. Andrea's final destination is Montreal. As for me, I am kind of just along for the ride, because I just finished college and there is nothing I would rather do, and because I want to do this little project of mine, the psuedo-ethnography/art project about the people who pick up riders on Craigslist.com Ridesharing.
Our first day on the road, July 6th 2007, I had been up all night packing, fretting about leaving so soon because I hardley felt ready, only having graduated and gone home a week and a half before. Because we didnt have much money, because I everyone else seemed to think it was dangerous and insane, because I didn’t know when I would ever come back. Our first rideshare was a 23 year old girl named Autumn. She was beautiful, loved the beach, drove a Jetta, went to UCLA. The kind of girl I, having gone to UC Santa Barbara,thought I knew all about just by looking at her, but the best thing about our trip with her was how quickly she made me realize what absolute bunk that was. That and the fact that we got to LA in less then five hours and $40 worth of gas. She told us about how she used to swindle old men gambling on the ohio river, how her life plan was to move to Central America and start an NGO based on AIDS education and releif, how she was nothing like my narrow little assumptions would have pinned her as. Wonderful.
She dropped us off on the corner of Venice and something in Culver city, where my friend Chris, an all-around fun chem grad student lived, who actually might have been the first person to ever buy art from me several years ago. He came and met us on the stoop of his apartment, hung out for about half an hour and then gave us the key to his apartment and went off to a previous engagement. The three of us spent the night walking the streets of LA, eating ridiculous attempts at vegetarian food from Fatburger and standing in line for half an hour to go inside a 711 that had been converted into a Kwik-E-Mart in promotion of The Simpsons movie. They had redone the outside completley to look like a cartoon, and had Duff and Buzz cola, Krusty-Os and big pink sprinkled Simpsons donuts, which Andrea, Leslie and I all enjoyed. They even had clerks in Kwik-E-mart uniforms. Half the fun was seeing all the over the top Simpson enthusiasts in line in front of us. The lady behind us had already stood in line four times. hah.
In the morning, our friends Josh and Rebecca Redman drove down from Thousand Oaks to pick us up on the way to the 10 east. They pulled up on the street under Chris's balcony playing the ukelele from the drivers seat of their minivan, with both doors open. With them, we drove for several hours into the desert until we got to the Salten Sea, which apparently is California's largest lake, hidden out in the flat, arrid desert of south-eastern California. It comes at you out of nowhere, a vast, clear blue sea out in the badlands, bordered mainly by boarded-up motels and deserted gas stations. Outside the van, the air was hot and thick and smelled aggressivley like fish. A few miles up the road we stopped at Bombay Beach: a well-below-sea level town famous for a flooding that happened in the 1950s, where the Salton Sea buried an entire neighborhood of trailors, completely submerging them in water, and as it evaporated over time, left an eery, post-apocolyptic feeling wasteland, once half submerged in water and now just deep in dry cracked mud. The heat and the smell were overbearing, but the stop was well worth checking out.
After that we went a few more miles down the road to Salvation Mountain, which I have already written about previously on this blog, and it was once again amazing and inspiring, except it was SO HOT. Something about July during a heatwave in the desert makes walking even the smallest distance seem like murder. That night Andrea, Leslie and I went back to Indio, the town where Andrea was born, but hadn’t been to in years and years and where her aunt still lived. We stayed one night with her Aunt Toni, enjoying her air conditioning, her gatoraide, and her outragously generosity. In the morning, she treated us to a Del Taco breakfast, loaded us up with snacks for the road, and bought us 3 greyhound tickets to Pheonix... for safety’s sake. And Andrea left the state of California for good through the same city she entered it.
In Pheonix we stayed most the time with Leslie’s extended family, and one night with my good friend Zach (of the band iji)
The last few days in Pheonix (three days? four days?) have all sort of a blurred together in the heat. The things that stick out to me the most are, in list form:
-Reuniting with an old best friend of mine, seeing that despite the rather unbeleiveable things the eight years since we’ve seen each other have brought, she is still the same glittering one-of-a-kind personality I remember her as
-hanging out for hours at Pheonix’s two finest social establishments, being the Willow House and the Trunk Space, both all-ages cafe-turned music venue/art gallery type places where Andrea did spoken-word for the first time, and where we saw, over the course of several nights, The Teeth, Andrew Jackson Jihad, and Visions of a Dying World, Polka Dot Dot Dot, Jordan O’ Jordan, and lots of other good bands and good people
-Going to Crafts and Conversations with Leslie’s indomitable 90 year old grandmother and a feirce crew of other old ladies at their local church
-The amazing breakfast we ate at the Zach’s house
-Playing lots of Guitar Hero with Leslie’s fantastic cousins
-Being really hot
-eating soooo much Mexican food.
Thats about it for now, I guess. Til next time.
home is a time not a place.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment