California might be famous for its summer and its breathtaking landscapes, but a winter road trip led me into the lives of its people.
Prologue
When I bought my tickets to attend a conference in San Francisco, my PhD advisor was quite specific. Come back after the conference. I kept ten extra days, to explore the area around. Afterall, conferences should be utilized to their full potential. I’ll plan something later, I thought. I finished work related to the conference one and a half day before leaving (a huge margin), went to bed, and opened the map. It was only then I realized how sparsely populated America is. If I started walking it could very well be days before I reach any human settlement (the implication being I’d have to lug around a lot of food). If I could get a cycle, I could potentially (only slightly overestimating my capabilities but generally speaking humans are capable of more than they think) cycle enough to reach places to eat and sleep. The last option was to rent a car, and that could always be a place to sleep in. This is the problem with looking at maps on a screen. A whole continent on the palm of your hand or a city just as easily. The scale just does not hit you hard enough. Looking at the map gave me more confusion than clarity, everything looked far away, and everything looked tempting, I lost most of my sleep in excitement, couldn’t make a plan, and decided I’ll make a plan (or something like that) when I reach. I packed in my tent, my sleeping bag, and my violin.
It was cold enough to convince me even if cycling around might be possible, sleeping outside and cycling would not be. There is a reason they long so much for summer here. I went in search of a rental car. Back in Bangalore, during a fest in our institute ICICI bank was running a campaign to sell credit cards. I had applied. They had many verification steps. The mess started at the very first step, the phone verification. I had to describe my occupation, student/ research scholar was not an option and the guy on the other end told me I should just put in whatever option felt nicest, it’s just a formality and it was the bank’s problem, not ours. The second step is where a guy is supposed to come over, and see if I truly exist, at the place I’m supposed to. The guy almost came, called me, I was near my office, I told him I can reach the hostel in five minutes, he left. I got a message saying my credit card application has been denied, and I can’t apply again for six months. I got another call for more verification. I told them to stop giving me mixed signals and decide whether they wanted to sell me a credit card or not.
That’s how my search for car rentals without credit cards began. I searched through all the agencies in San Francisco, and all of them had some issue or the other. At Budget debit was still okay but prepaid freaked them out. My card says debit + prepaid, I tried to convince them it could be used in either mode (I do not understand the difference), they did not relent. I finally reached Sixt, they started the process. The center you are at has to match the prices being shown online, and that almost led to me getting a convertible. I am deeply convinced insurance is a grand scam which is run on collective belief. During this search for cars I had read through the insurance programs, and while I still do not claim to be an expert, I was very clear on what I needed. Collision damage (LDW) and liability (SLI). I do not need an agency to call the tow truck for me or tell me my flight has been rescheduled and refuse to pay for that service (peace of mind). The guy at the counter told me he already knew I’d opt for only LDW and SLI. They went through everything and decided there’s a mismatch between my driver’s license and passport (I look a drastically different person in all my photo IDs and that didn’t help my cause). I couldn’t be given a car, they said, some alert is going on right now. Give me some alternative, I asked. They said Fox is pretty lax, try them. Fox, I was told was near the airport. By the time I reached Fox, I had been thoroughly drenched in rain, was given some granola bars by an old lady while standing below a church façade for a bus, dried on the bus and faded sunlight, and realized it wasn’t that cold if it rained, so even if I didn’t get a car at the end of the day I’ll just start walking and see how/where it goes. Fox told me they stopped taking debit cards a few weeks ago (website differs on this, but that’s because this rule is California specific). Is there any other alternative, I asked. The man operating the counter left his post to make a call. He knew a guy. He had his own agency, so he makes the rules. Credit, debit, or cash, it didn’t matter. I was asked about my destinations, and upon hearing mount Shasta, a refusal came. I asked for his conditions, after all, my plans could be made accordingly. The conditions were simple, the car could not be taken out of California (just a little bit is okay), and it could not be taken to places with snow since it was a two-wheel drive. Fortunately, I had started to understand California is huge.
It was arranged that he would come and pick me up in his van and take me to his office. Christian, a Filipino guy, had just been informed that his booking had somehow been cancelled. We were both sitting outside and talking. He had started studying mechanical engineering, stopped because of too much math, and took up a job as a trainer in an airline. Now he still uses math for his job every day, but its much nicer math, so he’s happy. “Where we come from, cash is king. You have cash you take the car/ bike. Here credit is king.”
Sam Noorizade, from Iran was running the car rental agency. The deposit was 250 dollars for everyone, but I’m from India, we’re practically neighbors, so it became 100 dollars for me. I was a bit apprehensive about telling him I did not have very specific plans. After all, a lot of trust and goodwill was involved in this transaction without credit cards. But I told him my rough ideas, and he was very appreciative. “Take the car, head out, from that intersection you go right it’s 101 south, you go left it’s 101 north. Go. Go wherever you want. It’s beautiful. You’ll love it.”
The Wild Wet West: Big Sur to Santa Barbara – 18th December
Our whole research group had come for the conference. The last men standing were Venkatesh and Sai. They were staying at an air BnB. Venkatesh had plans of going to Yosemite, but in the end got caught up in taking care of the whole group. If the car rental process had not been so elaborate a car would have come to us earlier and we could have made a visit to Yosemite. But at this point they still had shopping and packing left to do, and I could only take them to a beach nearby, Pacifica. I stayed in their place for the night. It was a cloudy morning, I started off my journey by pissing off street cleaners by being the most inexperienced and unnecessarily cautious driver in the city.
Soon, I was on route 1. Reddish brown Mountains came down from the left, the ocean stretched out on the right. Misty clouds rolled through the mountain passes. White waves rode fast and strong on a grey green ocean throwing up streamers of white spray, and crashed on the beach below. Light rain kept the rhythm up. Sometimes a little soft sunlight found its way through the clouds and turned into a golden spray on the grey landscape. In places, rocks rose out from the beach below. Waves crashed into them and turned them into waterfalls on the waterfront.
The most difficult part of driving was the beauty. I had to stop very often and admire.
As evening approached the weather became calmer. A “quick” detour for natural bridges state beach sent me to the heartland of monarch butterflies. I had read about them in class. The weather was still warm enough for them, and there I was standing in a forest of tall trees, occasional raindrops coming down, the ocean swooshing on the nearby beach, while butterflies fluttered around and over me.
Around sunset I stopped at Seaside, just before Monterey. Surfers were going into the water. Won’t it be cold, I asked. A little chilly maybe, one guy replied. They had been going in since morning, when the storm was stronger and the waves bigger.
My destination for the night was Santa Barbara. I wanted to say hi to the place, and a friend of my mother would have a place for me to stay. I had parked my car in a parking lot, reversing into the space next to a car which had come in headfirst and gone for a coffee. When I came out, the other car’s owner had arrived, she looked at my style of parking and said “yeah, right?”. I had heard parts of route 1 was closed, so I asked her if she knew anything about it. “I wouldn’t go there babe, last year we had floods and rockslides, and they’re still repairing it. I have heard its closed, and you’d have to come back around in the middle of the night. I’m a hairdresser, I hear a lot of things.” She had kind green eyes, her words made a lot of sense, I headed over to the main highway, route 101.
I reached Santa Barbara around 9:30. Somnath was the best person I could’ve stayed with at the beginning of this journey. He was an activist with the Democratic Social Alliance. This was the first time I met an Indian migrant who’s a political activist. I had a lot to learn.
How do you organize while having socialism (or even democratic socialism to soften the blow) right in the name of your organization? I have got the drift that it’s almost a taboo word here. He explained how largely media plays up one side. “Of course, there are people buying it, but that’s not all people. If you actually go around and talk to people, you’ll see they do understand the problems. Translation to votes is a messy thing. Both the parties are set up in a way to be run by big funders, so smaller groups within the parties get drowned out in the short run. And with strategic geographical divisions of the voters, both parties get some benefits, people not so much.”
He told me stories of Republican cities and states offering free bus tickets to the homeless and illegal migrants and shipping them off to Democrat cities and states. Then they can show their economic and social policies are the best – clean roads, clean people… Does it work, I asked. “Not really, anybody looking at the details understand what’s really going on, how people are becoming homeless. And more importantly, illegal migrants stay where they do because there is an economic requirement for them. If a republican government sends away every illegal immigrant, the local economy will practically crash. All of this is just for the theatrics, the numbers of people being shipped off are large enough for the show, small enough to sustain an economy running on underpaying people.” There were stories of cities declaring they will welcome migrants, be a safe refuge, and ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement) officers being arrested by city police while trying to harass migrants.
How is it that I see all major communities have leading activists, but I don’t see much political action from the Indian diaspora? “That’s not really true, and that impression has a lot to do with what media throws out. If you look at the second generation or so, you’ll notice a big difference in attitude towards political activity. Children are taught from school what their rights are, and they care deeply about it. Now it’s open to them to interpret what those rights entail. Which is probably why you’ll see whatever people do here, they do with extreme enthusiasm. The right wing is extreme, but so is anyone countering them. Big protests against Israeli aggression on Palestine are actually being organized and led by Jewish people. But you also have to understand how people live. People working at the lowest end mostly work two or more jobs, how will they have time for anything else, like organizing? If you give them barely enough to survive, all of their life is taken up in barely surviving…”
But what about people working at higher paying jobs in IT? They are still exploited workers of a different kind, their standard of life is high but there is no work-life balance, I asked. “If your focus is on making more thousands and millions, do you really care about changing your conditions? Somebody you know has been in this set up and made a lot of money. You would not try to change a system which works on making only some people rich, you’d just hope and try to be that somebody.”
Definitions of success are dangerous things. A lot the higher paying jobs, especially in IT are worked by Indians. Right now, I’m almost at the dead center of the supply side. One night in our center we were discussing growing up and our school lives. Harini, a girl from Kammam, Andhra Pradesh, had a horror story. She went to Chinmaya, which is basically a coaching center in disguise as a school for IIT/medical entrance exams. They had two divisions, one for the precious aspirants, the other for useless kids who did not want to go to IIT. The star kids’ division had a strict class schedule. The useless ones were much more free, they grew vegetables, had market days. The stars would hear music coming from the market day, while they practiced their class material, and only be allowed to visit their useless counterparts during the one-hour recess. And this started from seventh standard, when you just hit your teens. You have barely started puberty and your career is pre-chosen. Every single person from Andhra I asked had a similar story except one girl, Likhitha. She was from a small village, where it was a bit more easy to not have the highest possible ambitions and hence to not sacrifice all of your childhood, went to a college which later shut down, and is working at the same place as all of us here are. Everyone else went to coaching centers for school exams, bachelor’s exams, master’s exams, PhD exams… It never stops. Another friend, Vandana, had talked about her experience in a Hyderabad coaching center, where she’d arrived with dreams of becoming a physicist. They were fed formulas for everything, formulae which didn’t even make physical sense. A whole subject reduced to a thousand formulas which are outright wrong outside of their example use case. Somebody in her class had an epilepsy attack, the class went on, you can’t waste your time when there are a thousand important formulae to learn. She learnt she’s bad at physics. Right now, she’s independently discovering state of the art statistical techniques just because she was working on a groundbreaking problem, and couldn’t work without getting a physical sense of the problem. If you can think on your own, you’re the worst student a coaching center can have… Harini’s “school” has now been extended to the fourth standard. You don’t know what IIT is, you’re not safe, your parents don’t know what IIT is, you’re not safe, your extended family/society knows. You end up in IIT, you end up in IT, you end up with a high paying job in US (or a company based in US which keeps most of it’s work force in India because it’s cheaper that way), and your value in the marriage market shoots up. Success is well defined and it’s a currency that kills it’s carrier slowly enough.
Over the Mountains, into the Desert – 19th December
I started off in search of butterflies. I was armed with a hand drawn map to a forest grove. I tried to tally it with the map on my phone, it spun me around the place a few times, and I gave up. I had seen the butterflies yesterday, I wanted to get a feel of the rest of the town before heading out. I went to the wharf. From around me, the Pacific Ocean rolled into the golden palm lined beaches, into the arms of Santa Barbara rising up with the Santa Ynez mountains behind.
By the time I was partially ready to leave, it was afternoon. I kept my map offline to save mobile data. Very quickly the map drove me straight into the traffic jams of Los Angeles. Los Angeles was not really in my plans, but now that had come in, I took the exit to Tarzana and stopped for a coffee. Jasmine, the barista had shifted here from Seattle. She used to be in design but was not finding it to be what she wanted. She wanted her designs to be on people. So, she came here to work as an apprentice at a tattoo establishment. She likes coffee, so being a barista is a nice side job. Her family was from China and Hongkong. If only her break was longer, and I did not have a few hundred more miles to go…
The plan for the night was to stop outside of Joshua Tree National Park. I had gone through the internet in search of free campsites. USA has many agencies managing its vast lands. The National Park Service offers paid campgrounds within the parks. A sister agency is Bureau of Land management. BLM is a federal organization, managing federal lands. What it means is, the land is public, so the public is free to use it. Camp anywhere you want and leave no trace. BLM has two campgrounds in (vaguely near) Joshua Tree town, and that was my destination.
I crossed the Cajon pass in high winds. I kept my windows open to smell the road and sense the speed. Clouds drifted passed my headlights, and through my car.
The last stop I made that night was San Bernardino. Pack your shit out is easiest to practice when you do not take shit in. Prostitutes searched for customers, I searched for free toilets. There was a band I had found back in school, Boys like girls. One song went “It’s time to roll down the windows/ We got all we need, so here we go/… Alright, at five minutes to midnight/ We’ll see our name in city lights/ We’ll make the clock stop, make your heart drop and come alive…” I had always imagined it as describing some people maybe at the end of high school, going for a late-night drive, pulling out of their small town, yellow orange streetlights flashing by. And that song was playing as I pulled out of San Bernardino, windows rolled down, hair flying in the wind, streetlights fast disappearing and turning into headlights in my sideview mirror.
It was about 10:30 when I reached the BLM campground. The BLM campground was on top of a hill, definitely far away from the town. It was a vast open desert-grassland choose your own adventure make your own campground place. I had been warned that Rednecks camp in BLM campgrounds, and they speak with guns. My cousin sister has recently married (my lifelong quest for an elder sister is finally fulfilled), her husband, Bret has some redneck in him (I do not remember whether the connection is ancestral, cultural, or musical). Bret had introduced me to a song, “Rednecker”. The song essentially says you might think you’re redneck but I’m even more redneck. I had told my sister as a joke I’d play it when I drove into the campground given its reputation. As chance would have it, it indeed was the song playing while I searched for camping spots, away from some vans that were already there.
I found a spot miles away from anyone else, driving over uneven dried up mud flats and turned the car off. Far away headlights scared me sometimes, in the same way I would have scared the people already present when I arrived. Based on stories I’d heard, my brain cluttered up. Are they trying to shoot me? Do they think I’m trying to shoot them? Nobody knows and hopefully nobody shoots. Prisoner’s dilemma for prisoners of gun freedom.
I got out of the car. Stars glittered above and around. City lights twinkled below.
I went to sleep in the back seat of the car as the moon went down behind the mountains in a waterfall of light.
I Found What I was Looking for: Joshua Tree National Park – 20th December
The best thing about sleeping outdoors is that you wake up early. I came out of the car and stretched my arms and legs. The sun was just coming up over the mountains, wafting soft golden light into the valley under a vast blue sky. Dry yellow grass stalks caught the light in their tips, their roots still nurturing some of the darkness left over from dawn.
I packed some trash I could see lying around along with my stuff and headed for the town. There were some people with camper vans who had set up a temporary fence around their vehicle. They had an outdoor kitchen/ playground/ living room/ garage set up in the patch of land. Some had dogs lazing around in the morning sun.
At the park ranger’s office, they marked out places I could visit in the day, some short hikes. I drove up, and the Mojave Desert stretched around me. Small brushes sprang up in places from the dry ground. Hills of bare rock rose up high. And the Joshua Trees appeared. They looked like trees with a bearded face, standing tall in a desert full of only bushes and cacti, solemn observers of the golden sun and rocks, a surprising splash of green in an otherwise empty blue sky, waving at the occasional baby clouds.
I started the hike to Barker dam, and immediately got lost in the desert. After reorienting myself, I eventually reached a rock with petroglyphs. I stood in the rock’s shade and stopped for a while. The sun above was bright, the winds a little chilly, they carried fine dust from far away. It was as dry as it could be. And yet, humans had been around. For thousands of years, and their simple drawings told an intricate story, open to interpretation. To me, it was a story of people and animals, living and moving together. A presence carved out of the rocks like the petroglyph itself but painted with life of the desert.
The barker dam had been built at a natural outcrop of rocks. The area behind the dam had dark green bushes springing out of the ground. A burst of life in a very barren landscape – almost a worship of water.
I had thought I would skip some of the recommended places if it became too late. If only it was that simple. It was getting late, but I could not leave. I ended up going to all the recommended places, came out of the park as the last rays of the sun drained away from the sky, behind the mountains. I stopped at the visitor center to thank the park rangers.
I stopped somewhere outside Yucca valley to watch the nightfall. Dark blue skies had grey clouds holding on to the last hints of purple pink sunlight.
My next destination was Death Valley. I was driving through single lane country roads. My father had taught me to follow other rule breakers when it’s not clear how much the rules can be broken and where. I let pickup trucks pass to show me the way and take me on a wild speed ride. The clearest channel on the radio was playing extremely Christian songs. I was happier with Spanish songs sparkled with a little static. Old woman springs road hits Lucerne and takes a right turn towards Barstow. I was mildly in need of a stop, and right at the intersection was a café with bright lights, glowing in the middle of the darkness all around. The café it turned out was closing down, but my stop was worth it, the stars were just coming up.
In Barstow I stopped at a Starbucks. More than coffee I needed the Wi-Fi, to figure out where I could I sleep. Death Valley is the only national park that allows dispersed (free) camping inside it, and there was supposed to be a BLM campground somewhere around.
A huge pickup truck was parked outside, with a decal on the windshield that read “Girls get dirty too”. There was only one person inside who looked like she could be the owner. I thought she’d be the best person to ask about free campgrounds. Selvig had come down from Washington to meet her girlfriend in Las Vegas. Now she was heading back to her partner. We figured out places I could sleep in, talked about her adventures. A huge dog had been stranded outside, and he was having a lot of fun chasing people who could be scared. Selvig and I showered love on him. He was showing more affection towards Selvig than me, so she taught me: “Blink at him, dogs like blinkers”. It worked. I met her two huskies, traveling with her on the truck. A goodbye hug and we went our separate ways, with the hope to meet again somewhere someday.
I left the highway behind at Baker and turned onto the Death Valley Road. Some way down I stopped at the car and stepped out. I was standing in the middle of a desert, it was raining a little bit, the clouds were small, and moonlight came down with the rain. The moonlight made the Funeral Mountains glow white. One of my favorite smells is petrichor, one of my favorite sounds raindrops coming down, but it was different from anything I’ve experienced before. It was as if the whole earth around me had been waiting intently waiting for rain, and this intense desire spilled over into the smell, into the sound around me.
The map showed me there were two towns before entering the park. I had been warned to be prepared before entering the place. A park ranger had told me in the morning that he had been in Death Valley once, wanted to go to another place within the park only to find out that was some 80 miles away. The park had three gas stations inside but sold their product at a huge markup. And of course, stocking up on water was essential. I passed by Shoshone, thinking I’ll fill up the tank at Death Valley Junction. Death Valley Junction turned out to be just that, a junction. And a single building which looked vaguely functional. It was not a gas station. It is now, while writing this I looked up the population. It’s 2.7. The figure after the decimal is due to a cat being considered 0.7 parts human.
Most of the free campgrounds were closed due to floods last year. It was allowed to camp anywhere a mile off any unpaved road, but my car was not built for such purposes. The nearest campground I could find looked like a paid one. A very drunk man out to pee confirmed there was a machine which sold tickets. I drove off to find another possible campsite that showed up on the offline version of my map. There was no cell reception. After reaching that spot and seeing a no camping sign, I decided it was time to pay for camping if necessary. I went back (a round trip of one hour). It was raining, and the tent poles got stuffed with sand mud and rocks while being jiggled around, the tent couldn’t be opened. It was around 2 AM, I was thoroughly wet. There was no point in getting more things wet, and at least my shirt was washed now. I went to sleep in the car again. The windows were completely fogged, I had total privacy.
From Death Valley to Life in Lone Pine – 21st December
I woke up and took in the sight around me. Bare golden mountains rose around me in waves. Nobody was around to check for camping tickets, and the machine was a bit confusing, so I left for free (not proud of this). At Furnace Creek Visitor Center the park rangers marked out a map and sent me off. A solitary coyote greeted the cars heading to Badwater Basin.
Badwater basin is the lowest point of North America. A plaque high up in a hill nearby marked the sea level. Waters of the valley had drained here and deposited white salt. As I walked around, salt scrunched under my feet. Usually, this place has very little water, but higher rainfall had made a huge shallow lake of clear water. I was standing on white salt, at the edge of clear water, and looking up at mountains capped with white snow rising up to clear blue skies. Sometimes it was hard to tell the salt below the water from the reflections of white clouds on the water.
I drove off into the Artist’s Drive. It took me through rolling hills, running wild with colors. Mountains of bright red and blueish green exploded from the brown landscape. I came back down to Furnace Creek to thank the rangers before heading out. Furnace Creek was a splash of green trees in the middle of a vast yellow desert.
I stopped at Mesquite Flat and watched the sunset unfolding across the sky. Yellow sand dunes rolled of to be cradled by red mountains. The moon became brighter over the land of the sun.
I was heading towards Alabama hills, near Mount Whitney. In the afternoon the car had started to flash “Maintenance required soon” on the dashboard. There was only one person qualified enough to address my concerns. Bret. He can drive his truck a thousand miles across Canada with a single stop if my sister’s not around to enjoy the road with. If anybody knows cars, it’s him. He said if the car is behaving nicely the message can be ignored. The car struggled on the climb, but probably only because the climb was from the lowest point in North America to one of the highest. I stopped at Father Crowley Overlook. Cold winds blasted past me. The darkness below swirled with moonlit clouds in valleys rolling away into the distance.
Two days of sleeping in a cramped space and walking around dusty deserts had gotten to me. Migraine made even the dashboard lights hurt my eyes. I desperately needed a good rest.
I stopped at Lone Pine; a town so small you’d miss it if you missed the speed limit sign. Warm food and water felt like magic. Opposite to the restaurant was a hiking/ backpacking store. I could see somebody was inside, and thought he’d be the best person to ask about campsites. I had cleaned my tent poles, and was somewhat confident after warm food that the tent would open this time. He was closing the shop down, and I was clear I was after information, not equipment, but he invited me in.
John got a map out for free and marked out the route to several campgrounds. “You go up this road, you’ll see a road closure sign. Take a left and follow the map. There are huge bumps, don’t go above 15. If you’re like whooo I’m doing 30 you’ll tear the bottom out. If you keep going up you’ll see nice spots and you can camp there, it’s mostly BLM land. Just watch out for places Los Angeles owns though, it’ll be marked. But there’s also a paid campground, Tuttle Creek, it’s only 7 bucks, and there’s a toilet and trash cans. Maybe better to stop there? You can purge your car. But you’ve slept in the car for two days, you can really use a good rest, sleep on a nice bed, get a warm bath. You’ll be ready to start camping again tomorrow. If you want that, there’s a hotel two buildings down, after the blue and red flashing lights. They have rooms for less than 60 dollars. That’s probably a good deal.” It was a good deal, but there was one problem. “Do you think the stars will be out tonight? I don’t want to miss seeing the stars.” We went out of the store. “I generally check the radar but haven’t followed it today. There are clouds, but they look pretty high. Probably you’ll get a few clear windows. Take a left from the traffic light, you’ll find the road to the campgrounds.” This caught my attention. “This traffic-light?” I asked. “Yeah, there’s only one traffic light in this town, we like to keep it simple. Maybe there are a thousand people here. The high school batch that graduated this year had 71 kids. If they don’t leave this town, that’s everyone they’ll know. But this is the center of the water wars of the west”. We were back in. I needed to hear more. “This is Owens valley. Cattle ranchers used to live here, after pushing out the Indigenous people. They built ranches up in the mountain slopes, where they could stop a little water, use it. They used to have cooperatives and would trade mostly with Los Angeles. Some people came from Los Angeles, saying they wanted to grow paddy, in the swamps down in the valley. Sell us the rights to the swamps, nobody has any use for it, we’ll also run a cooperative. People of the town agreed, not knowing these newcomers were actually representatives for the City of Los Angeles. The swamp is where the water collects, so unknowingly they sold away their water to Los Angeles. Mulholland, the guy with the road named after him, quickly built an aqueduct. Lone pine does not own its own water.” I burst out, “Aren’t there check dams or something like that in the mountains to keep the water here? Is there no treaty between the two places setting down rules about how much water Los Angeles can take?” A wry smile flashed across his face. “Go up the mountains tomorrow, every single dam you’ll see belongs to Los Angeles. Last year we had very little rain. The aqueduct was so dry the kids were skating in it. Los Angeles was like our trees are dying here, your trees will dry up there too.” John scribbled down the name of a movie and a book on the map.
“If you stay at the hotel, freshen up and walk down to Jake’s Saloon. It’s a proper old western saloon. Has its own brews.” I had still not grasped how small this place was. “Is it on this main street?” John was amused. “Yeah, the whole town is just Jake’s backyard, man.” Now I had to stay in this place. I walked down to the Dow Villa hotel, and told the woman at the counter that John had sent me here, with words of a less than 60 dollars price tag. “Of course, we have rooms like that, but the bathroom is shared. Doesn’t really matter though, you’re the only one on the whole floor tonight.” On my receipt it read “Black Rate”. If I had let the internet guide me, I’d have ended up in a higher priced, larger motel chain – quick, clean, and devoid of stories. This place was a hundred years old, looked like a home decked up for Christmas from old English story books. Los Angeles, while stealing water also provides quite some trade to this place. Plenty of movies have been shot in the nearby Alabama hills, and this place was the center of this operation.
I walked over to Jake’s. A very energetic pool tournament was going on. I got a commentary on the pool tournament from one of the players, was invited to session of shuffleboard by a couple. The drinks lived up to the reputation John had created. As I left the place, the night was chilly, but I was warm from the hugs and the cheers.
If you’re in the area, these places are impossible to miss. But here are the links to John’s shop, Jake’s saloon and the Dow hotel, just in case you need them.
Bridgeport: Stop for the Dinner, Stay for the People – 22nd December
I drove up the Alabama hills. Most of the landscape was bare rocks in wild shapes. It had been a warm year, so the trees were experiencing a late fall. Occasionally there were splashes of bright red and yellow. I parked my car and went off on a hike. The trail was supposed to go around a mountain. What looks like a trail can also be a path for water, and about halfway I lost the trail. I climbed the mountain to find the trail again. I was greeted with a view of undulating rocks stretching out below me to rise up in the horizon as blue grey mountains covered in snow. Water can fall, humans should aim not to, and my route back to the car was a nice little navigation challenge through a sea of rocky land.
It was afternoon and I went back to John’s store. He was surprised to see I’m still around. I told him this place was too nice to leave early and he gave me a knowing smile. I asked him for more recommendations. He got some paper out of his little receipt printer and started making a list. A little girl was playing with balloons, sometimes fighting them, sometimes hiding them for us to find. She wanted to put North Pole on the list, while being very insistent on Santa’s non-existence (the Grinch still was a real character in this universe though). John and I had a hard time trying to discuss the origin story of Santa with her, as it became increasingly difficult with every sidetrack she went off on as new thoughts spawned in her head.
My first stop was at Manzanar. During World War 2, after the bombings at Pearl Harbor, the US government had become suspicious of Japanese origin Americans. The government went into a paranoia, deemed all Japanese Americans to be spies working for Japan, and rounded them up in concentration camps. Lives were lost not only in the internment camp, most prisoners lost everything from their old lives. A few of them had good neighbors who protected their properties, the rest lost their homes to bank foreclosures. Thousands had nowhere to go, citizens attacked by their own government. The story felt hauntingly familiar as John narrated it. I could barely hold back tears in that place. It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. Snowy mountains rose up on either side of the valley. The skies were a deep blue, the air fresh. A sole eagle ranged the skies. And on the ground were watchtowers and barbed wire fences.
I left to continue towards the next place John recommended, the ancient bristlecone pine forest. “A guy slid off the mountain in the morning because he couldn’t keep control in the snow. You’ll be fine. Those are some of the oldest living things on the planet. Some trees are four thousand years old. It’s worth a visit.” At the fork from the highway, a sign warned that attempts to approach Death Valley from this end would result in fines and jailtime. A narrow road, sometimes becoming a two lane, sometimes half, took me up the mountain. Soon enough, I was high enough to have snow around me. The car was not supposed to come to snow territory, so I decided I’ll continue as far as the tracks of previous vehicles have cleared the snow. An abandoned check post had a sign declaring the road is not maintained in this half of the year, but people coming in are free to proceed at their own risk. Driving on snow is as counter intuitive as anything can be. The slower you drive, the less traction you have. Armed with my physics knowledge I kept going up. Finally, I reached a curve where the car ahead of me couldn’t leave a clear track behind, and instead just scrunched the snow up into ice. This was out of my syllabus and my car’s capabilities. I had no intention of flying off a mountain curve, but by this time was already into the curve with no space to turn the car. I reversed keeping my wheels in the tracks I had made going forward until I reached a junction in the road some distance away. There was fresh snow at the junction, so the car could finally be turned around to go down the mountain at a speed I’d prefer.
I waited for some time, sunset was just about to start. Golden light bounced off the white snow, danced with the deep green pines, and dissolved into the bright blue sky. I came down from the mountain to find the entire valley caressing tresses of golden pink clouds, as swirls of mist poured shades of darkness into the ground.
As I turned right onto the highway again and resumed my journey north, night had started. It was one of the clearest nights, the land was a deep black, the air was laced with traces of moonlight, and on either side of the road, mountains rose up. The snow on top of them was matte white – something that wasn’t exactly a glow, but also was. And stars filled the sky enough to pour down till the horizon. There is something exhilarating about looking out from the windows, the windshield, and seeing stars there.
There was a campground I had thought about staying at, and it was still quite long drive away. But there was something on the way I wanted to see – Mono lake. As I got down from the highway, I’ll admit I was a bit apprehensive. The road was gravelly, and there was no traffic whatsoever. If something were to happen with my ride, it would be hard for help to chance upon me. I drove extra carefully and reached the parking lot, it was a little bit away from the shore. The temperature outside was below freezing, and the winds that blew were laden with so much salt that it made my nose burn a bit. Even with my jacket on, I was cold. There was only one thing to do: Run. After all, just a glimpse of the lake from the parking lot was not enough, I had to see it up close. In the moonlight I ran over wooden walkways and marshy vegetation, and reached the shore. Mono lake is so salty that when the water evaporates, the salt is left behind as crystals. These pillars of salt and limestone rising up from the lake are called Tufa.
I stood, looking at brown-white Tufa rising up from the lake like fingers, almost coaxing down the snowy mountains and glistening stars to reflect it perfectly in the still waters below. I had tears in my eyes, and what can only be described as thankfulness in my heart – I got to see this. There was no one around. The moonlight and wind were cold, but I had to stay as long as the warmth from my run would let me. This was beauty that needed to be seen. I was overwhelmed, I got to be the one.
By the time I was back on the highway, I was getting hungry. I did not really want a gas station meal, and decided I’ll stop whenever I spot a place to eat. I drove on and on, without any such places. It was getting pretty late for anything to be open anywhere, and the hunger had had reached new heights. A fork in the road came, I slowed down to take the left turn, saw a Bar and grill, and enthusiastically skidded to a stop on the gravel shoulder.
I walked into Rhino’s bar and grill. The bartender told me the grill was closed. For probably the first time in my life I was disappointed in only the bar being open. I asked if there was anywhere else I could head to. She looked up all the options she could think of on her phone and told me there would be absolutely nothing open anywhere for miles. A guy beside me had heard the conversation and asked “are you very hungry?” “Extremely”, I replied. “How many are you?” he asked. “It’s just me”. He asked if I would like a sandwich. I was surprised and overjoyed at the possibility, and expressed as much. “Come with me, my store is right behind this bar, I’ll open up and fix you something to eat”.
There were some serious amplifiers in the shop. It turned out that Tracy was a musician. In pursuit of learning music, he had worked as a driver for sitarist Ravishankar. I told him I had my violin in the car, and would love to jam should he be up for it. He immediately went into a dilemma. “I haven’t played with a violinist in some time, it’s tempting. But my daughter’s back from home from college for three days. I told them I’d be back early.” “In that case it’s probably better if you go home, but I owe you a drink for fixing me dinner”. We went back to the bar and grill armed with my huge sandwich, Tracy finished his drink and said he’s decided to take my advice and head back home. After all, it’s not the end of the world if we didn’t play together that night. By the time I was done with the food and the drink, Tracy had gone home, asked for extra time from his wife and daughter, and come back. “You know what, my fingers are a little injured, so I’m not going to play the guitar, but there’s a piano right here, I’ll play that, you bring your violin.”
We started playing, and the ten people in the bar gathered around. Tracy left after some time, but now Max wanted to talk. Max, like a lot of people had heard a lot of things about India, especially poverty, and having grown up poor in America, wanted to compare experiences. He had studied anthropology in college, and worked as a firefighter with the BLM. I thanked him profusely for the great work BLM does. After all, a large part of my journey had been possible because of BLM campgrounds. The anthropologist in him had woken up and the we had plenty of questions for each other, more than the bar could allow at the late hour. The barwoman closed the bar down and sent us outside. This was not really a problem as there were chairs on the sidewalk. Bridgeport, he told me was a town of about 500 people. The population more than doubles briefly in the Christmas season, counting a few people coming home and more coming in for recreation. But you met Amber inside, right? Maybe she’s the only one who can truly say she’s from here. She’s Shoshone and Piute Indian. (Meeting Amber was hard to forget. Upon learning I’m wandering through California, I had been introduced to Amber as “Hey, you’re Indian, and he’s like a cowboy!”. No Indians were offended.) “Shoshone? Like the town on the other side of Death Valley?” I asked. “Yeah, people were forced out of their lands, had to move around, Amber was lucky, she grew up on a reservation.” I had to ask if growing up on reservations could really be considered lucky, having read horror stories about life in reservations. “Well, you’re right, only some reservations can offer a good life. You need educated and intelligent people to run a reservation that’s good for the people. And you need really good lawyers. Some reservations are making big money from casinos and businesses, but to set those up you need vision, planning and resources. It’s harder for the smaller ones, and they’re trying really hard to bring up people who can work for the community. Amber has had a difficult life, but now she’s raising her daughter here. Her daughter’s one of the brightest kids in the school. She danced in a red dress in the last school exhibition, and no one can deny she’s the princess she wants to be. Amber is sacred to me you know”.
The conversation then turned to India. “Do you really not eat beef because cows are considered gods and they get to roam around free everywhere?” I told him how India has a long history of eating animals, and cows being forbidden food in Hindu culture is a recent manufacture, a strategy to harden Hindu-Muslim divides along with Hindu caste divisions. Max was surprised when I clarified that I meant a few hundred years as recent. “Our whole history is a few hundred years here”, he laughed. I also told him about how the past decade of rightwing rule has done everything it could to push forward a sense of injured religious majority to garner votes, and come up with sometimes forgotten and sometimes fresh activities to attach to the Hindu identity.
He had many questions, but one of his friends had joined us. This man introduced himself as ninja Peter. Ninja Peter was fairly drunk and kept taking the conversation in varied directions, and Max couldn’t get his answers. But Max never got frustrated with Peter, and had to tell me the story of how great Peter is. Years ago Max had been riding a Harley somewhat drunk and crashed into Peter’s garden. Peter was going out to get beers, saw this stranger lying on broken flower pots, and just told him to wait there. So Max waited, fearing he’ll be reported to the authorities. Peter came back with the beers, helped Max out, and got him to the hospital. “I could see you’re a good man, you were just in a bad place” Peter said. Beautiful as it is to see two grown men professing their love for each other, it was getting really cold, and I am not really acclimatized to that kind of weather. I told them I should start off, it was late, and I still needed to find a place to sleep. “You don’t have a place to sleep for the night? You can sleep on my couch if you want. You can sleep on either of our couch really” Max invited. What I felt was beyond relief. There was a question though. “Are you trustworthy?” Now this was logical paradox. Saying yes is not being trustworthy, the only trustworthy way to reply to this question is “I have been trustworthy so far”, but that upon hearing that Max wasn’t assured. He got the logic but logic is not always exactly convincing. Max went into deep thought as Peter laughed: “You came into this town a day after solstice and played music and now you’re sitting here talking to us”. This logical cum emotional dilemma suddenly met an unexpected resolution. Blizzard, Peter’s black dog came out of the black night and jumped up into my lap. I was immediately deemed trustworthy, and conversation continued with Blizzard on my lap. My name is difficult to pronounce for people, (some say even my own pronunciation is incorrect according to how letters should be pronounced in their language). Max and Peter were now plunged into the same challenge my name has put people around me ever since I moved out of my home state. My name was turned into everything from “Shoyd-Rick” (Floydian?) to “Short-Dick” (Freudian?). A nickname was required, it was decided, but Rick was deemed unacceptable as it was just a shorter version of my name. Peter looked at me for a few seconds and burst out “Dog-Bearing-Mother-F*king-Rick”. We finally headed off for Max’s home when he felt like showing me the local hot spring. As soon as we got up though, he realized he was not sober enough to hike to a hot spring and bathe there in the middle of the night. We reached Max’s home to be greeted by Rosie, a puppy about a year old in age. She was also massive, and was built mostly with muscle and love. She knocked Max over twice in excitement, and then established herself as a firm part of our conversation. Not paying attention to her meant being licked, drooled over and generally tossed around by the ball energy that she was.
Max fished out a secret reserve of whiskey, some artificial ice-cubes, and we sat down. “If you’re poor here, it still means you probably have a car. But you have to think about how much you can spend. Folks used to ride cars without any air in the tires to save up, it’s called riding the rim. Towns were divided by railway lines, generally the northside would be rich, the southside poor. That’s were expressions like “wrong side of the tracks” and “southside” come from. Things changed for me when an uncle died, and he left us with money from some IBM stocks which blew up.” I asked him what typical salaries were like. I had seen quite a lot of buildings so far which would definitely be considered posh in India, and even with amazing conversion rates favoring America, something felt like it did not add up. “It used to be easier, jobs used to pay much better. Now on my pension I would barely be able to make ends meet. My wife works as a teacher and earns a bit more than me, and that’s how we can live nicely. It’d be much worse just by ourselves.” I still do not understand why any government would want even its direct employees to live in financial instability. I’m sure economists have come up with some reason.
Max had met his current wife some years ago, while on a fireman’s conference. It took some time for her to accept Max’s advances, but Max admired that as a quality. His previous wife had been disloyal, but Max had ensured their child grows up with sufficient funds and love from his end, he was happy to move on. He proudly told me of his wife’s achievements. During a harsh winter and power outage, she had been the one to organize the whole community to run a shelter and a kitchen.
We finally went to sleep around four. I dozed off on the couch, in the warmth of a log fire, a man who had been a stranger just a few hours ago and a dog overflowing with love.
If you’re in the area, and somehow still need weblinks to find these places, here’s Rhino’s bar, and Tracy’s deli.
Lassen – 23rd December
I woke up early. Max had told me to start off whenever I felt like, and that it’d be unlikely for him to wake up before noon. I made coffee following Max’s instructions from the night before. I washed my cup and whatever else was there in the kitchen, it was the least I could do as a thank you. I also left a thank you note and a bar of chocolate as I left. It was incredibly hard to say bye to Rosie.
Outside, the windshield of my car was covered in icicles. It was pretty hard to see through the white layer. I thought water might melt it off, and found most of the water left in a bottle in the car to also be frozen. The water I threw on the screen immediately froze over and now my screen was mostly hazy white. The dashboard started flashing a light which was completely uninterpretable to me. I stuck my head out through the window and drove over to the fuel pump nearby, thinking they’ll have some solution for my problems.
A Mexican family saw I had no experience handling snow, and jumped into action with a snow scarper. Another woman taught me that the alien light on my dashboard was just low air pressure in the tires. I thought pressure might be low just because it was cold, and decided to let it keep flashing. After all, over filling air and popping the tires when they heat up would be worse than driving with a little deflation.
Soft pink light was seeping through the sleepy blue sky. The snowy mountains started to shine in early morning yellow as I started my drive. I stopped for breakfast under grey clouds laced with golden light, and the sky was bluer than ever. Around me were mountains that refused stay dark brown in the golden sunlight.
The air pressure light was still on, so I went to a fuel pump. The lady there taught me how to use a pressure gauge. The only tires I had inflated by myself so far belonged to bicycles. A guy from a low-income country didn’t know how to perform a basic task because there always had been someone who’s full time job was to do just that.
I reached Lassen around evening. I asked the park rangers where I could go to, given that roads were snowy and both vehicle and driver were underprepared for such conditions. They laughed and said what vehicle I had did not matter, all roads were closed and I can go anywhere I want to on foot. I walked over the snowy road bathed in afternoon light to find a sunset spot. On the way were hot springs, and steam danced across the road. I kept climbing the mountain further and further, chasing the sunset. I was in a landscape of white, painted with golden pinks and purples. As I sat watching the mountains and the skies and the ground below me change color, evening turned into night. The moon was already up, and now moonlight glowed on everything. The snow was white enough to reflect moonlight back up from the ground. I had never been in a place which so overflowed with moonlight. What would I have missed if I had left in a hurry.
Epilogue
An engineer turned farmer. A couple who cared enough to learn about each other’s professions, and prompted each other to tell me stories from their fields. An activist who invited me to his home for Christmas. A bartender who wouldn’t let me pay for a beer because “you talked to me nicely”. A lady who requested me to whistle a carol because I was absent mindedly whistling something while crossing a street. A waitress at a truck stop diner who gave me a discount for truckers because I had always dreamed of being a truck driver. From people I had planned to meet and people I would have never met if I had stopped somewhere else, the warmth and love I got will stay with me.
Many people tell stories of places they’ve been to as a list of troubles and distresses. Maybe it was my parents telling me about their travels with the joy of being amazed, with humor in disaster, and with a sense of “you can do stuff it’s no big deal”, that always made me want to explore the world. Maybe it was just me being childish, thinking I can pull stuff off if I want to. Whatever it was, I am glad it brought me out.
