THE UNITED STATES:
NOT ALL BULLETS AND BIBLE-BASHING
Spotted in The Drifters Cafe, Hobart Tasmania (January 2004):
‘San Francisco Man Becomes First American To Grasp Irony’
The UK paper the Daily Telegraph spoke to Jay Fullmer, thirty-eight, who became the first American to come to grips with the concept of irony yesterday.
‘It was weird’ Fullmer said, ‘I was in London and, like, talking to this guy and it was raining and stuff and he said, like, ‘great weather’ or something like that.’
Said Fullmer: ‘And I thought – wait a minute, it’s like, no way is it great weather.’
Fullmer soon realised that the other man’s mistake was deliberate.
‘This guy was pretty cool about it,’ Fullmer said.
Fullmer, who is thirty-nine next month and is married with two children, aged eight and three, plans to use irony himself in future. ‘I’m like saying it all the time.’ He said. ‘Last weekend I was like grilling steaks and I like burned the crap out of them and I said ‘great weather!’.’
There are a lot of misconceptions about Americans, as we are about to find out…
Finally getting on the bus with Sofie at New Westminster, Vancouver is strange. Leaving the Righteous Gary and the seemingly conflicted Donna is something of a mixed blessing. We both have this feeling that Donna needs to be rescued. On top of this Sofie is still boiling away with her ongoing internal dilemmas.
Canadians generally tend not to have anything good to say about Americans, and so I have a fear of the unknown United States. Leaving Canada though I love it so much there, abandoning a potential relationship… getting to the US border after asking lots of advice about what the right thing to say is… Finally I actually don’t care any more, my emotional confusion is so desperately mixed.
The border guy asks me why I am coming to the US. He couldn’t be asking me a more pertinent question if he tried, but he’s not to know that. I tell him the truth (except the bit about how much money I have, hitch-hiking, sleeping under bushes and voluntary work in New Mexico). He gives me a three month stamp. That’s one less hurdle to cross.
Sofie gets lots of hassle, mostly because she tells them two conflicting stories that add up to bullshit. Doh.
Anyhow, we are sitting on the bus, and I feel awful. Actually my heads full and I don’t want to hear about any more of Sofies dilemmas.
She talks to a couple of guys on the bus, and then we both end up talking to Kunte Kinte McDonald from South Carolina. He has a story to tell that is as dramatically loaded as his name; about being kicked out of Canada, being raped by a cousin and being very emotional… he lifts my spirits which I am very grateful for. He also has the most spectacular name I’ve ever encountered.
I Chat to a young guy from Australia/Canada, which is also inspiring; I take note when I encounter people that are choosing to live a lifestyle that is outside what is considered ‘normal’. His thing is to be living alternately between Oz and Canada, six months at a time. If he can do what he likes, then so can I.
It doesn’t seem to take very long to arrive in Seattle.
I really like it here, which is a pretty mean feat for a city and me. I am instantly struck by its sense of culture. Good place.
We book into a hostel down near the sea front. Wind whips up the sea. We can hear it crashing about nearby behind the uplifting smell of the fish market. A real live place, and its also good to get back indoors again too after tasting the vibes of this place.
In the hostel we meet Steve and Ray, from Tucson Arizona, who are on their way to Canada to escape the potential drafting up of young kids that may be obliged to join in George Bush’s ‘War Against Terrorism.’ They intend to write about freedom. Really really nice guys.
Sitting at the same table with us is a pair of young English newly-weds, on their honeymoon. They reel off their itinerary to us which basically amount to travelling around the world at break-neck speed; fly to New York, two days there, fly to Seattle, one day here, fly to San Fran, one day there, fly to Singapore, two days there, dumpty dumpty doo and so on to Sydney, two days there, fly to Cape Town, two days there etc and then home again. I’ll let you fill the gaps yourself if you haven’t got airsick yet.
They happily tell us how they are going to do this in three weeks. The rest of us are utterly bewildered by their approach and attitude to travel; I have always felt the idea of ‘doing’ a place rather than ‘spending time’ in it is something rather crass. Box-ticking and insensitive, like having a series of one-night stands instead of having a relationship.
For me, it is something to find the details; the plants, how people are similar or sometimes different. ‘Doing’ a place seems to involve little or no real connection.
Maybe this young couple are more concerned with the nuptial end of things anyway…
Next morning, Sofie does passport/visa enquiries (panicky phone-calls to the Belgian Embassy in Las Vegas) then we get the bus to Aberdeen.
It’s very windy, raining tons and all the lights in the town have gone out. It’s a bit grim.
Here I am, introducing Sofie to the delights of hitch-hiking and rough-sleeping and how you can get to feel a real connection to places… The conditions are really horrible. What a way to start. I know she could probably use some comfort. (Me too actually.) Anyway, she’s pretty brave/open-minded and up for it. My estimation of her staying-power is going up. I tell her it can get pretty grim. A guy on the bus going to Graylands says he’ll show us a good spot to pitch up for the night. Miracle.
We end up sleeping in amongst some old growth forest by the sea, on some old travellers camp; we rake together some plywood for a floor, eat food out of carrier bags and put a pick-up trucks rear hood over us as a roof.
Well cosy…well; I think so anyway.
In the morning, Sofie tells me that she appreciates it too.
A long time later, I am to discover that we have been hanging out on Kurt Cobain’s home turf (Aberdeen). That seems to figure, considering how dramatically malignant the weather has been; a place often makes a person. I am thinking of changing my name to ‘Burt Cocaine’, for absolutely no real reason that I can think of.
The first time I ever hitch-hiked was supposed to be a week-end trip made by me and Christine my girlfriend at the time and her super-gay mate Andy. We were all seventeen. It was Andy’s idea.
Andy had Big Hair in the Duran Duran mode and would frequently hitch-hike to nearby Oxford to indulge in ‘cottaging’, the noble art of pursuing casual gay-sex for money in public toilets.
When I asked him what he wanted to do with his life he would always tell me rather blandly and obliquely that he just wanted to ‘spank his plank’. Whatever that meant.
It was half-term from Newbury College and me and Chris were getting under her dad’s feet at home so we decided action was necessary. It was Andy that got us out onto the road and into our first grown-up adventure.
All three of us stood by the main road out of Newbury and by some miracle we somehow found ourselves transported to Wales. For Free! Meeting new people! Wow! One driver drove at breakneck speed down extremely windy lanes whilst having his head turned back to us in the back seats, blithely explaining that we needn’t worry cos he knew these roads like the back of his hand. We hoped that he was also psychically tuned-in to the random perambulations of stray sheep and cows on the road. We almost shat ourselves.
By the end of the afternoon we were suddenly in Exotic Aberystwyth. We found a field with a shed in it, purporting to be a camp-site. We duly paid our three quid pitching fee, stuck the tent up, got stoned and ate all our food. Being the inexperienced know-nothings that we were, we had pitched our tent on a fairly steep incline. We collapsed into the tent in a big human lump patently too bulky for the small tent. Gravity got the better of us and we slumped in a downhill direction and heavily into the now-bulging sidewall of the tent. It must have looked like a huge grotesque testicle from the outside.
Being stoned, we somehow slept, waking up the next morning having had our arms seemingly relocated to slightly different parts of our upper bodies and all the vertebrae in our necks rearranged. We ached. We needed breakfast. A fried one; from a cafe.
We staggered down into town and sought out a reviving breafast. Andy went off to do his own thing, which I suspect probably involved him ‘spanking his plank’. Mysteriously that was the last time we saw him for about two years, but we weren’t to know that at the time.
We had spent the early part of the morning sitting on the shingle beach, romantically waiting to watch the sun rise up out of the Irish Sea. Which it didn’t of course. That would have been a neat trick for the sun to rise in the West, but we weren’t to know that either.
The April morning merely became less turgid.
We headed for the nearby cafe ‘Y Graig’ – The Rock. It was a hippy cafe. The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers should have been in there but I think we had just missed them. Egg, chips and beans all round and steaming mugs of tea. The radio played ‘What A Waste’ by Ian Dury and the Blockheads and everyone in the cafe was singing along to it – a cheery ditty about happily not achieving any kind of socially acceptable career and choosing to just to loaf about instead.
Outside we encounter a scruffy unshaven but happy-looking bloke with a dog.
‘Do you live here?’ we asked him.
‘Yeah! I do! I love it here!’
‘How do you get to do that?’
And he told us how we could sign on the Rock N Roll (Dole) and get ourselves a place to stay from the council. And then, Aberystwyth would be our oyster.
Tomorrow was the first day back at College. We were miles away. Both of us were bored of our courses and her dad was becoming sick of the sight of us cluttering up his small house.
We decided that it was better here.
It was this very morning that me and Christine ‘dropped out’ and officially became hippies. We duly spent the next few months indulging in all the usual hippy pastimes…
First comes puberty. Some years after; liberty.
I would go and visit my mum and dad and they just plain didn’t get what I was doing my my life.
After Wales I abandoned my poo-coloured Vauxhall Viva. Actually it got nicked which was a real bonus cos it was an unsaleable heap anyway. I was very happy to explain to my mum how now I was really free – I didn’t have to work, so I didn’t have to have a car. I could hitch-hike to the north of Scotland if I wanted (which I did, frequently) and it didn’t cost me a bean. And I got to meet loads of really great people too. Couldn’t do that on the 9 to 5 could you?
Aaahh… freedom, freedom…
Meanwhile back in the Good Ole U S of A…
It’s the morning after our sleep out under our impromptu den. Me and Sophie are rubbing our faces back into some kind of semi-reluctant wakefulness. Sophies hair is all messed up and speckled with pine needles.
The sun is shining and the sea is nearby. We are heading south along the coast on the famous Route 101:
U.S. Route 101, all 1,504 miles of it, runs from Tumwater, Washington at the southern tip of Puget Sound somewhere not too far from here, all the way south to the East Los Angeles Interchange; the busiest freeway interchange in the world.
It follows a trail originally laid by early Spanish settlers who called it ‘El Camino Real’ (The Royal Road). It became a metalled road in 1926.
It is known along its length by various names; The Oregan Coast Highway, The Redwood Highway round the forested areas of California and The Pacific Highway along the rest of it, or just plainly ‘The One Oh One’ everywhere else.
It passes mostly along the coast, sometimes through the Giant Redwood forests. The Golden Gate Bridge carries it on its shoulders.
Along with Route 66, it is recognised as one of the great legendary road-trip routes of America. (We didn’t know this – we got here kind of by accident.)
We stick out our thumbs and in almost no time get a ride with a guy who offers us half a day’s work cleaning shelves in a store he’s fitting out. He gives us thirty bucks each and then offers us a chance to crew on his boat going from San Diego to Fiji in June!
Next a ride in the back of a pick-up to South Bend that gives Sofie the beginnings of dreadlocks; her long blonde hair flaps uncontrollably as we tear along the country highway.
Almost out of Washington now. The coast is beautiful, it reminds me of Scandinavia. Then we get a ride with Hank, who’s of Finnish stock and tells us about his sailing adventures round the world. He feed us and houses us for the night. Pretty good for a days hitching.
Whilst bedding down in Hank’s office, I notice an envelope with a Norwegian stamp and name on it. When I ask Hank about it, he tells me this part of the States has a lot of ancestoral connections with Norway, Sweden and Finland.
I have a theory that maybe when the new settlers left old Europe maybe they would choose places to settle that were just like where they had come from. I am guessing that might be partly out of homesickness but then again it might have been for more pragmatic reasons; If you know how to grow wheat, you settle in wheat growing country. If you know how to live by fishing, then you settle by the coast. If you live by forestry, then you settle in a forested region. People brought their skills, habits and traditions with them. I am to realise later on that America is full of little pockets of living history.
It is astonishing to think how much this once wilderness land has changed in just a very few ambitious generations.
I have noticed too how much more quickly we get rides together than if was on my own. That’s the undeniable pulling power of having a woman with long blonde hair with me I guess.
January 23rd Astoria Oregon:
So here we are, off on our way to a place I’ve grown up with through TV and films and I imagine I know about but actually I don’t know at all…
From just south of Astoria, we get a couple of little rides to Seaside, and then a huge long one (ten hours in the car) with Angelo. He is a half Italian/quarter Cherokee/quarter French from Chicago, who enthuses about personal relations with god, the meaning of life and that sort of thing. Very nice chap indeed.
Even from the mere announcing of his family background, I get a sense of the vast unfurling of the American story.
I love way that hitching alternates doses of bad weather, friendly sometimes inspirational company, solitude, bad food, good food…
Angelo buys us a huge pizza and we discover we are going to pass through Giant Redwood country. Sofie says she’s on a mission and needs to get to L.A. as soon as possible and is somewhat panicked by the thought of us getting side-tracked.
I’ve been wanting to see the Redwoods since I was a kid, and compromising by spending half an hour in the dark (by the time we get there) isn’t going to be enough for me!
Angelo drops us at the visitors centre after we finally manage to find it just after sundown and we bid him our fond farewells.
Me and Sofie sleep on the wooden porch/veranda for the night. It’s already starting to feel warmer, which I’m very excited about; respite at last for my almost terminally soggy bones.
Sofie’s getting pretty worried about getting to LA in sufficient time, and after the closest thing we ever have to an argument, we arrive at a compromise about what happens the next day.
We spend a little time looking around a bit at some of the amazing redwoods. They are on average about six foot wide and 130-170 foot high. Beautiful.
Sofie has a big wobble, we have lunch, and Sofie chills out significantly.
Ah… its amazing what a spot of lunch can achieve.
Inside the visitors centre, I dazzle the volunteer wardens with my sparkling Englishness; I enjoy having this as a built-in conversational trump card. ‘Gee, I had a brother who was stationed in Glow-cester-shire during the war’ and all that sort of thing. In mid-flow a chap announces himself to me as being a New Zealander when I get to the bit about intending to travel to that end of the world. After almost no conversation with him at all, I find myself invited to his house back home in Wellington, and he gives me his business card. Right then, we’ll make it a date…
At 4 pm we start walking down the road to the highway. It’s a beautiful walk, passing an endless glide of majestic trunks that reach high and strong to the sky, but it gets dark before we get a chance to hitch.
We meet a park warden who recommends a place to sleep out. He also tells us that we are not supposed to camp out, and that also if we get picked up by any other warden that ‘He never saw us, okay?’
Next morning we hitch in an illegal spot on the 101; we’ll never ever get a ride otherwise. Two young dread-locked hippies pick us up. They are out and about looking for land to buy and do the homestead thing, and we all wind up in Ukiah, something of a hippy haven from what I can gather.
Then, after some friendly advice from a cop that we are standing in the wrong place, we get a ride with a yummy young woman who does environmental education in Northern California at Berkeley University as a volunteer.
Our last ride of the day comes from two young New Yorkers who look a bit like the Harry Enfield comedy characters Kevin and Perry. (Spotty overweight kids with sideways baseball caps.)
We end up visiting a friend of theirs in Santa Rosa who has lots of cats and dogs, and then we get a free look round San Francisco by night time with them. (Kevin and Perry, not the cats and dogs.)
We walk round Haight/Ashbury, which is frankly not very interesting. It’s full of all the kind of hippy tourist tat you’d expect it to be. The two New Yorkers are off to pick up a friend from Oakland airport, so we go with them; I’ve got an idea the airport might be a good place to sleep for free.
To our dismay, the airport is a mad bustling place even this late in the evening. Of course I should have realised that airports never sleep. The waiting lounge is all glaring lights and tannoy announcements…
Both of us are very tired and getting a bit irritable. We walk out of the airport in search of somewhere a bit more gentle to be, and end up walking about a mile, climbing a six-foot chain-link fence into a golf course where we sleep under gnarly old eucalyptus trees whose wonderful scent mixes occasionally with the wafts of a nearby landfill site.
Into California, mythical land of plenty, Hollywood, hope and immigrants:
‘One evening as the sun went down
And the jungle fire was burning
Down the track came a hobo hiking
And he said boys I’m not turning
I’m heading for a land that’s far away
Besides the crystal fountains
So come with me, we’ll go and see
The big rock candy mountains.
In the big rock candy mountains
There’s a land that’s fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night
Where the box cars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
And the birds and the bees
And the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the big rock candy mountain.
In the big rock candy mountains,
all the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth,
and the hens lay soft boiled eggs.
The farmers trees are full of fruit,
and the barns are full of hay,
Oh I’m bound to go, where there ain’t no snow
Where the rain don’t fall. The wind don’t blow
In the big rock candy mountains.
In the big rock candy mountains,
you never change your socks
And there’s little streams of alcohol
come a-trickling down the rocks.
The brakemen have to tip their hats,
and the railroad bulls are blind,
There’s a lake of stew and of whisky too,
You can paddle all around ’em in a big canoe
In the big rock candy mountains.
In the big rock candy mountains,
the jails are made of tin,
And you can walk right out again
as soon as you are in.
There ain’t no short-handled shovels,
no axes, saws or picks,
I’m a going a stay where you sleep all day
Where they hung the jerk who invented work
In the big rock candy mountains.
(whistling)
I’ll see you all this coming Fall
in the big rock candy mountains.’
This wonderful song is about the hopeful dreams of a hobo, of some mythical place where the hard times end. Its part of the deep American story of peoples migrating to their future. This song has been sung by many singers, first recorded by a guy named Harry Mclintock in 1928, though its probably way older.
It gets sung as a song for kids with the words changed round a little. There are though, rougher versions too rough for putting on a pop record:
The punk rolled up his big blue eyes
And said to the jocker, ‘Sandy,
I’ve hiked and hiked and wandered too,
But I ain’t seen any candy.
I’ve hiked and hiked till my feet are sore
And I’ll be damned if I hike any more
To be buggered sore like a hobo’s whore
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.’
Coff.
I woke up this morning marvelling at these beautiful eucalyptus trees, to the mixed sounds of airplane take-off rumblings and quirky birdsong and hummingbirds flittering about over our heads. We didn’t see much of San Francisco so far, but this is really nice!
It’s taken us five days to come this far down the 101, roughly one thousand miles.
The gradual change in landscape has been welcome and quite sublime. Northern California is warm with mountains, gently rolling hills and rich alluvial plains at the bottom of them, full of vineyards and cows. A laid-back lifestyle is the norm. Lots of people with long hair and a noticeable number of old hippies. There is the occasional dead ‘magic bus’ sitting mouldering away on grassy properties. I get the impression there’s no self-consciousness about any of it, like no-ones got anything to prove.
It’s a beautiful morning, the birds are twittering merrily, and we haven’t had our arses kicked by security guards. Today we hitch to LA…
We discover we are on completely the wrong side of the city, and have to hop on and off a bus and a train and another bus till we end up in San Jose. I love being here; I can just about recognise San Jose from the end of ‘The Graduate’ where Dustin Hoffman is trying to stop his girlfriend from getting married to the wrong guy and he is running down the middle of the road to get to the church. I’m sure we’re on that very road.
We’re in film-land and it’s sunny and warm. I can get easily excited sometimes. We have lunch and try to hitch out on the interstate highway, get pulled by a cop, and then having been caught we head back into town.
We get a bus to Salinas and when we arrive we head back out to the free-way again ready for the next morning (except we get lost). A guy in a pick up sees we are lost and offers us a ride. He introduces himself as Frankie and tells us that he’s with ‘The Family’ and used to run guns and drugs in Las Vegas, but got out of the gun stuff cos it was too freaky. He is noticeably nervous and spends a lot of energy looking over his shoulder.
I really get the impression that he’s actually a nice guy. I have something of a revelation; that people don’t necessarily choose to be in the Mafia; some get born into it, and don’t have many options about whether they involve themselves or not. If you don’t want to be part of it you either kiss your relations goodbye and have to hide very very well, or end up dead. Not much of a family if you ask me.
Sofie checks out somewhere for us to sleep, and we end up under a bush not far from the intersection. Sofie is concerned that she has picked a rubbish spot and thinks that sleep will be an impossibility cos of being so close to the freeway, but I know better…
God bless wax earplugs.
The next day we travel with Carlos, a smooth speaking Hispanic who is working as a Chinese translator in the military. I get the distinct impression he’s muscling in on Sofie. This bothers me for a variety of reasons that I can’t quite put my finger on at the moment.
Oxnard, near Malibu; Looks like another Hollywood film location. It probably is. Bruce Willis nowhere to be seen.
We end up staying at a place that Carlos is doing up. Him and Sofie are pretty much ignoring me, running off for romantics and not telling me they are going off. Being a gooseberry is a pile of crap, especially as I have this protective thing about Sofie going on in my head. And I don’t trust this Carlos guy as far as I can throw him. He’s toooo much of a smoothie. I get the distinct impression he knows exactly what to do to impress Sofie. Maybe I’m just jealous. I don’t want her to get hurt; she’s already pretty flimsy about herself. Oh stuff it. It’s her life; I guess she just has to learn her own way.
It occurs to me that I spend a considerable amount of energy being in confrontation; with the born-agains in Vancouver, and around this situation with Sofie and Carlos. I’ve had to stop to try to understand what the Sofie/Carlos thing is about. I guess on both counts I feel very protective towards her – she worries and gets easily pessimistic, which I find very frustrating sometimes; getting caught up in that stupid game of trying to solve her ‘what-ifs’. I’m not sure I should be putting myself in this advisory role. It’s difficult seeing her appear to walk into situations and make conclusions that I just wouldn’t make. Part of that is that I want her to overcome the difficulties presented and not to give up; partly because I want to see her succeed, and partly because I would like to be able to see her again somewhere on this trip.
When I’m not feeling frustrated about her, I like her company. Some things I find really difficult about her. I don’t trust that she’ll go for an outlook that I would consider open-minded; too much emphasis on evil and sins of the flesh and a narrow view of who’s good and who’s bad. She’s astonishingly insightful very frequently, but it seems to come at the cost of sometimes not being able to see what’s right under her nose. She’s a little bit of a space-head and sometimes manages to look like she doesn’t know anything. I know it’s just her lack of confidence that’s making her fall over so frequently.
Or maybe that’s just me. I guess I recognise it cos I’m like that myself.
Anyway, currently listening to an extremely funky radio station (www.kcrw.com, Kevin Pointier) at 2 am after taking a walk round the ‘burbs of Oxnard listening to ‘Nonsuch’ by XTC, one of the most English bands to have ever come out of England.
I’ve really enjoyed California so far – it’s been quite amusing to be where all those Hollywood people live and make some of their films. Keep half-expecting to see Bruce Willis and John Travolta or Clint Eastwood come zooming down the road in a convertible shooting theirs guns off.
LA isn’t quite the nasty scary place as I’ve been led to believe (though clearly there are some really dodgy parts), though it is quite weird to see derricks pumping for oil right near the edge of the city.
We go to Malibu, which is a fun surprise; I have always vaguely thought that it was a Hawaiian island. Not really my style as a destination, but out of tourist season, I really enjoy it, despite the absence of Pamela Anderson. Maybe because of the absence of Pamela Anderson.
I’m also really enjoying the huge variety of trees and palms here – it must be great to be a gardener here – lots of lemons, oranges, strange fruit I’ve never seen before, nuts, sort-of dates and trees with the most fantastic geometric dimensions. Love it.
It looks like people here love their trees too – all the gardens look great and the town is lined with trees down every road. Lots of agriculture here. (Fruits mostly.) Fantastico!
I find a tree with a trunk like a eucalyptus, form like a weeping willow and the leaves smell of citronella.
Tomorrow, me and Sofie will head back up north; she to Sacramento, and me to Sequoia National Park then Las Vegas, Grand Canyon and then New Mexico for maybe a month to help build ‘Earthships’. (Eco-houses made of tyres and dirt.) Hopefully, I won’t get nuked. (Huge military area.)
Being with Sofie is showing me lots; about the debilitating effects of fear and anxiety, about letting someone figure things out for themselves, even though they sometimes look like they don’t have a clue. Gives me a idea what it might be like for a parent to have to watch their kid go off and make their own mistaks.
A passing open-topped car: Hurrah! Spanish Rap! Wicked!
I’m certainly no rap fan, but the scene makes it. There is something about hearing a type of music in the place that it comes from; rap in the Californian sunshine just seems right somehow. Bluegrass sounds fabulous on long journeys through the mountains and forests, and I expect that listening to country in the cab of a truck whilst driving through the vast flatlands of the Mid-west is the best thing ever too.
Having said that, I’ve heard rap music from different parts of the world where each language certainly changes the character of the sound: Sami (nomadic lapp-landers) rap sounds wonderful – like a magical incantation; German rap sounds horrific, Swedish rap sounds dreadful (the natural rythym of the Scandinavian languages clashes horribly with rap), English rap sounds – well just go listen to ‘The Streets’ and judge for yourself.
Me and Sofie get the public bus to Santa Barbara and then to Bakersfield via lots of orange groves. I let Sofie figure out how to plan the route – I can’t be arsed, and I know she’s the one who should be using her initiative. We get off the bus and we do a runner. (Neither of us paid.) It’s very naughty, but you can’t be good all the time.
We eat out at a Mexican place. I’ve yet to be convinced of the worthwhileness of Mexican food… Walking around town at 8 pm, a car stops and asks us if we need food. We turn down the offer, but instead get a ride out to the 99.
I look round for a halfway decent place to sleep by the freeway ramp. It would be hellishly noisy but for the saving grace of earplugs.
How much money I save with these things by not having to find a hostel (which would certainly be quieter than a freeway without earplugs).
Next morning me and Sofie have a bit of a heart to heart. She’s always freaking out about things cos she doesn’t have any confidence. I tell her to just do things she’d like to do anyway and the confidence will come afterwards. She just needs to give herself a kick up the arse, but I’ve a nasty feeling that she’s going to do religion before she does that. Oh well. Maybe that’s what she needs in order to find her motivation. I dunno.
We get a ride with David, a Christian chemical plant manager from Texas who tells us he’ll take us wherever we want to go!
He seems to represent for me the frequent imbalance of a religion which says ‘Be as nice as you possibly can to people’ but often forgets to say ‘Be as nice as you possibly can to the natural world around you’.
I am really sincerely impressed by David’s desire to be a servant to God by helping other people however he can. (This is apparent by his attitude to us and other things he says.) At the same time he’s obviously of somewhat frail health, the skin on his face and hands is all blotchy and flaky. He says it’s from working in the chemical industry, a highly poisonous business he tells us. I don’t challenge him on it, he’s such a nice guy, but it really seems odd to me that maybe it’s never occurred to him to make the connection between this ‘poisonous business’, his own health, what it must therefore do to the world around him, and his part slap bang in the middle of it all. Weird.
With some kind of understated significance to this, we go see the General Sherman tree, which lives in Sequoia National Park. It’s the biggest tree in the world. It is of course an amazing creature, but surprisingly, it doesn’t impress me as perhaps it should. It being a tourist honey-pot with cars and RVs all parked nearby and lots of people about doesn’t quite compare with the utterly wild magic of Meare’s Island off the coast of Tofino.
Big event of the journey though happens on the way up the mountainside to get here; Starting from the edge of the park in the foothills, we steadily follow a caravan of tourists in their cars. After not very long we hit what seems to be fog. I feel deflated that the trip is mired in an unfathomable inky whiteness. As we climb higher and higher, the fog gets worse. And then – The fog suddenly clears.
It isn’t fog at all. We have peaked; unbelievably, out above the top of dense low cloud. What is visible around us is a sea of pure white, interspersed with mountain tops rising out all around us like islands. Wow.
After this elevated journey we ride back down again, to the small town of Merced.
We say our grateful farewells to David; he resumes his random Californian house-hunting foray and we book ourselves into a cosy hostel for the night.
We are in small town suburbia. Friendly-looking clapboard houses line both sides of the dusty unmetalled street. The street is the width of an English dual carriageway. Houses can afford to be bungalows on account of the sprawling gardens around each property. The entire town is laid out in a neat grid.
This suburban arrangement explains a variety of things; why Americans can often be very chilled out. (Bags of elbow room.) Why Americans generally tend to drive everywhere. (All that elbow room makes everything else a long way off.) Why Americans in Europe stereotypically say ‘Gee ain’t that cute! Our houses/roads/cars/whatever are so much bigger back home!’.
It’s because they are.
Why Americans find England geographically confusing; we have too much lumpy geography and long complicated historical feudings to have anything whatsoever laid out in a systematic way.
Except Milton Keynes (whose bloody silly idea was that?)
The hostel, like Beesknees in back in Whitehorse, actually is just somebody’s house, barely modified to include extra bathroom sinks and showers.
Larry the owner is very interesting and we talk about agriculture and organic growing. This is the day that the Challenger space shuttle blows up, but none of us are aware of it at the time.
Next morning Larry drives me down to near where I can get a ride out to Yosemite, and I hug Sofie goodbye, which takes a little while. With a tear in my eye, I hope I see her again. I tell her if she makes it to Mexico, I shall DEFINITELY come and visit her.
I take three rides to get out to Yosemite. I get shown round by Patrick who has the horrible job of maintaining all the communications for the US’s state parks – he has to spend lots of time flying about in helicopters over massively pretty places. Oh well, someone has to do it I suppose… we scoot in and out of Yosemite in slightly less than an hour. (Shame on me for being such a grockle.)
The area was originally populated by Paiute (Ahwahneechee) and Sierra Miwok peoples. The Ahwahneechee were living here when the white man arrived. More white men arrived when the gold rush happened in the 19th century. In 1851 the US army pursued two hundred of the the Ahwahneechee in an attempt to drive them out. The Ahwahneechee were considered particularly violent by the Miwoks and they had frequent territorial disputes over the area. The Miwok word ‘yohhe’meti’ means: ‘they are killers’.
The US army eventually captured the Ahwahneechee, burned their village and relocated them to a reservation in Fresno.
The famous Tunnel Tree; The Wawona Tree was a Giant Sequoia that stood in the Mariposa Grove. It was 227 foot tall and had a girth of ninety foot. In 1889 had a tunnel hacked through it so tourists could photgraph themselves in their wagons. It finally gave up under the weight of heavy snow in 1969 at an estimated age of 2300 years.
Yellowstone was the first National Park anywhere in the world in 1872, and after lobbying for environmental protection by forward thinking Scotsman John Muir, in may 1903 Muir camped with President Roosevelt for three days there and by 1906 Yosemite was declared the second National Park.
Yosemite is UNESCO World Heritage Site and covers three quarter of a million acres.
Muir went on to further the idea of National Parks across other parts of America and played a crucial role in the creation of National Parks in Britain and elsewhere in the world. (Muir features on the Californian quarter coin.)
I had previously had an idea that I could cross through the Yosemite mountains eastwards into Sierra Nevada. There has been a heavy snowfall high up in the mountains and the road that leads out is shut. It’s broadly lit sunny day down here. We are at El Capitan, one of Yosemite’s most famous features. A wall of sheer rock that just rises up and up and up. We are hemmed in by mountains and it’s the kind of place where you get a crick in the neck from staggering round in total awe with your head tilted right back, and your jaw drops with dribble running down your chin.
A quick in and out – the grockeliest bit of touring I have ever done. Even down to the rapid duck into the on-site cafe loos and out of there with a handy burger from the cafe itself.
‘Oh look! Wow! Check out that wall of rock! Wow! Now howdya get out of this car park? Oh follow those other cars I guess…’
This is all down to shrewd hitching instinct, honest.
Patrick is here on a very brief business visit lasting about an hour. He has offered me a lift back out again, or I can stay here and make my own way back at my leisure.
One of the rules of hitch-hiking works like this:
some places are easy to hitch to and almost impossible to hitch out of. Tourists almost never pick hitchers up. QED, a ‘dead-end’ location which only gets tourist traffic obliges me to take my ride with Patrick back out again.
It’s a bit of a weird feeling for me, feeling so strongly as I do about ‘encountering a place properly’.
Back down in the foothills again…
A ride with Phoebe an environmental education type in Yosemite. She spends her entire summer up here showing kids from the city what else there is to experience in the world, taking them out on over-night hiking trips and building dens with them. What a fabulous thing to do with your life. We stop at the centre she operates out of. She has phoned ahead and has arranged another ride for me with one of her work colleagues.
Up through forested snow we go; then a ride with a couple of funky musicians from Berkeley (just across the bay from San Fran) out on a weekend trip.
They fill me in on how the coastal hippies very often get themselves parcels of land up here in the most secretive of places and grow themselves as much weed as they can manage.
I am out on to the backwaters of the 49, and it takes me ages to get a ride north up to Sonara; The country here is a bit like the Welsh Marches, undulating arable land. Cows. Another one of those standing in the breeze moments; recollecting and processing the people and places I have recently encountered, watching ears of wild grasses idly blowing about. Peaceful for a moment.
I get a ride with Mary and her drunk son Michael, a pair of hicks from Missouri, complete with matching red-checked shirts and battered denims. All they need to complete the outfit is a straw in the mouth each.
They have a colourful tale of running out of options back east, and risking all to try their luck out here with a cousin who had made the move earlier. I am put in mind of the Beverley Hillbillys. They really exist!
Towards the end of the day, I manage to get to the town of Sonara and instinctively do my thing of finding a dense clump of trees on a hillock at the exit end of town. Still next to a relatively busy road, but I am saved once again by the magic of wax ear plugs. (Little tip – only use wax ones; plastic ones will strip the insides of your ears of their natural oils and make them sore. And they don’t work nearly so well either)
The next morning I wake up covered in frost. I’ve dumped my black ‘donkey jacket’; a thick woollen workman’s overcoat that a friend from home had given me. It was a bulky thing so in San Jose I had shed the weight, glad to not be having to carry it and figuring it is all warm from here-on-in… Wrong!
I pack up my stuff and wander down to what amounts to being the early morning rush hour traffic. It doesn’t take long for someone to stop for me.
A big SUV slows and winding down his window, I get offered a blow job by a fat Mexican. No ta. Well I wasn’t expecting THAT this morning. So early too and I’m not even really awake yet. Derrr…
Then a little ride with a female student in a pick up (no offers of sex here which at least is not confusing), then a ride to ‘Frogtown’ – where they have frog jumping contests. (The good ones can jump about twenty foot.)
The town was made famous when Mark Twain published his very first story ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Caleveras County’ in 1865, which in turn brought Twain to the attention of the nation.
The guy giving me a lift through Frogtown is a Vietnam veteran who became a cocaine-busting bio-chemist in Bogota, Columbia for the US Federal Drugs squad. He declares George W Bush to be (and I quote;) ‘A whining spoilt rich kid jumped up little prick with a height complex’.
Couldn’t have put it better myself.
I am really enjoying the diverse and entertaining characters that hitching down through the west of the US is bringing me. Coming overseas I have struck a new seam of human intrigue. It’s very satisfying to actually meet ‘in the flesh’ the kinds of people that I might only otherwise have seen on TV.
My next ride is with a slightly fire and brimstone Christian chap who seems not to be the brightest person in the world. Despite this, he had been a church minister in Mongolia, China and South America. Despite whatever my knee-jerk thoughts are about evangelical Christians, there is something about this guy I find quite endearing. The fact that he says he loves life and has no regrets I think may have clinched it. He has a simplicity about him that I envy.
After painted stories of the Far East, a ride with some druggy trailer trash who have come up from San Francisco, an hours drive away. They are out hunting for crystals. This at first seems to be the stuff of hippy bong-dreams, but evidently there’s a wide variety of rocks and minerals along the San Andreas fault line.
They drop me off by what at first glance seems to be a cherry tree laden with blooms but on closer inspection turns out to be an almond tree. The ground is littered with what looks like dried green peaches but is actually the nuts with their outer shells and green husks.
So I go from a car full of get rich quick hopefuls to stuffing my rucksack to the gunnels with almonds for free. I think there might be something poetic in that.
Its warmer now out here in the open, the sun is shining and I have free food. Three things that pretty much always make me happy.
Another ride with an old chap who feeds me some of his home-grown oranges. He is a very nice chap who looks Norwegian but is of Irish origins, his family name being Bellamy.
Hmm! I can really appreciate a place where you can grown your own oranges and almonds. Welcome to the fruit basket that is California.
California; ‘The Golden State’-
The name California originates from the Spanish conquistadors, taken from ‘Las Serges de Esplandian,’ a Spanish romance written about 1510 which describes an imaginary island; an earthly paradise.
Another ride with another war vet (Korea/Vietnam) who flew fighter planes (says it was great fun) and now builds ‘muscle cars’ for kicks; not souped up, he just wants to go extremely fast.
He drops me off at the Sierra Trading Post where I proceed to flirt with Julie who works there. She’s forty, very yummy and great conversation. I of course want to jump into her knickers but unfortunately she’s very married and a bit biblical.
She’s stuck in a rut – I tell her to get driving lessons. I tell her I wish I could take her with me, tell her her husbands a very lucky man and we swap email addresses. At least I tell her how I feel, which I’m glad I did. I’m bored of unanswered ‘what ifs?’.
After initially buying some bread, I had left the shop with a nagging ‘unfinished’ feeling, so I go back and tell her I like her; something my innate shyness usually prevents. At least I think we have brightened each others day a bit. She is dead sexy though…
Standing not far from the store. I get no ride all afternoon. The excitement of the day catches up with me so I sleep under a tree pretty solidly. I wake up to frost all around me. Eventually I get a ride with a nice chap who gets me stoned, an appropriate way to leave California I feel.
He asks me ‘What do I think of the Americans then?’.
I tell him that I have been really pleasantly surprised. I have met some really great people. ‘Where have you travelled in the States?’. Just down the West Coast. ‘Oh! Yeah it’s all pretty cool round the West. Where you heading?’. New Mexico. ‘Oh wow!’ (he laughs) ‘You might find people aren’t necessarily quite so friendly further east! There’s some pretty whacked out people about!’.
It’s a strange one for me. On the one hand I have had some anxieties about coming to the States, but then on the other hand I have had people telling me all my adult life that hitch-hiking is nothing but an invitation to trouble.
He is great company though so I feel pretty good (and somewhat stoned again).
A ride with a Mexican kid who is very odd and wants to know what I am carrying with me. (Well that’s a weird question and also none of his bloody business!.)
Then another ride with an older Mexican gentleman who more than makes up for the discourtesy of the previous ride. He takes me to a casino and buys me a huge fish and chips dinner, in honour of my Englishness, I suppose. Even though the effects of the dope have now worn off, eating fish and chips with an elderly Mexican ina sand-coloured suit and matching cowboy hat in a casino full of neon flashing fruit machines is still pretty surreal.
Finally waving goodbye to the old fella as he drives away, I gather my wits once more and walk out to the other end of town (Gardnerville).
I get a short ride further out, and then another ride to Topaz. I am in Sierra Nevada now. I am between 6000-7000 foot up and rather cold. In between shelling dozens of almonds (which serves to lighten my load considerably), I get a two hour ride to Mammoth Lakes ski resort.
Sierra Nevada (‘Range of Lights’) has a sublime high rolling beauty to it, but pretty much zilch going on in it except for a huge salty lake. (Lake Mono.)
During the time of the dawning of things, much of western America was under sea, and as this sea became land-locked, the huge lakes mostly evaporated to leave various extremely salty lakes. (Hence Salt Lake City.)
I have moved away now from the comforting richness of the lush green coast now the first time since arriving in the US. Having crossed the mountainous climb of the Sierra Nevada edging up towards the infamously bleak flatness of Death Valley, it is immediately noticable how there are significantly fewer people here.
The mountains sponging up most of the available rain that blows in off the Pacific, this is clearly a much tougher place to scratch a living from.
Now I’m in a red and yellow plastic McDonalds wondering where to sleep for the night – it’s going to be cold. I’m 8000 foot up and I have ditched my donkey-jacket. Yuk. There’s a hostel for thirty bucks a night but that’s too much, and I’m a tight arse.
Well, I ‘sleep’ in a half-constructed building, wearing everything, including my waterproofs; found a propped-up wooden ladder that lead to a first floor of bare hard concrete. No external walls, wind whistling in. I pull the ladder up behind me. The floor is dusty, scattered with empty cement bags and other builder’s junk.
I get up at 6.30 am, pack my stuff away, which is horrible as my body doesn’t like the temperature change from cold to colder, and my fingers are so cold that they hurt like hell.
I go back to the nearby McDonalds for a long slow coffee. Look in the mirror in the rest-room. I really do look like an over-sized tramps turd.
I am a zombie. I have a shave. That helps a lot but I still feel dreadful.
Funny how a change in circumstances makes me view McDonalds differently.
My camera is broken and I want to get it mended before I get to the Grand Canyon. I don’t have many pictures of California, which is a pity, as I have enjoyed California more than pretty much anywhere else – it’s got so much variety. I take my camera apart on the McDonalds dining table, and put it back together again, and now it works fine. God only knows how I did that, but never mind. Tomorrow I will be in Death Valley, and then I’ll make my way out to Las Vegas to meet up with Roel and Floor.
I start off down the road and soon get a ride, the heating’s cranked up and I thaw out physically, parallel with a nasty smell that comes out with it, filling the car. My brain is heavily in ‘duh!’ mode.
On our way, we pass through the ironically named town of ‘Independance’. Ironic in that during the Second World War, it was the location of an Japanese-American prison camp in an area called Manzanar. (‘Apple orchard’ in Spanish.)
After the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbour in 1942, America was compelled the join the Second World War. Franklin D Roosevelt authorised the detention of all American citizens of Japanese descent. San Francisco even had its own Japantown, there were so many Japanese-Americans there.
In total, over 110,000 Japanese-American citizens, men, women and children were all deemed to be a threat to National Security and were held in ten camps situated throughout the Western US.
At Manzanar, 10,000 people were held during the war, two thirds of whom were born in the US.
This is a little-known part of American history; the camps were all way out in isolated areas. When the camps closed down after the war, they were largely cleared of most of the evidence of their ever having existed. (And we thought it was just the Nazis who liked to pretend nothing ever happened…)
All that is left of the camp is a guard tower, the remains of a traditional Japanese garden and the gymasium which doubled as a social hall. These days it is the museum for the Manzanar Natioanl Park, dedicated to the memory of the camp.
I get dropped off at the road junction for Death Valley and end up walking about six to eight miles into the desert, a good place to come to my senses finally.
After several encounters with a low flying jet fighter screaming about and baring it’s arse to me close up – it seems to be homing in on me as some kind of target practice – I get picked up by some sketchy old geezer who straight away tells me he’s been inside for hitting people and now he’s lost his right to carry a gun.
Great.
I tell him politely that no-one in England has guns, so there’s not really very much I can say about that. Thank god it’s only a short ride; He very soon drops me off by the collection of trailers you might vaguely and over generously describe as a small town. There’s battered old vehicles and dead aluminium dwellings scattered about spectacularly in the desert sand. Truly the land of trailer trash. The place is called Keeler. As in ‘keeling over’ perhaps.
This is not a place I want to stand waiting for a ride, so I walk some more into the desert, get a tiny tiny ride with a Kiwi woman whose aim in life seems to be trying to get citizenship in as many countries as possible. She married an American, got a divorce, works as a nanny, hence the baby in back of the car.
And now here I am, at the quintessential hitching point; a T-junction in a desert, and the only thing that’s going anywhere fast is a cold wind.
I Zen out on shelling almonds, and thus also usefully reducing the dead weight in my front bag. I’ve become one of those people who carries a huge rucksack behind, and a small one in front. I used to mock those people with their stupidly heavy loads. The moral of the story? Be careful who you mock, lest you inadvertently end up like them.
Anyhows.
I spend some indeterminate time going nowhere, maybe an hour or so, or seventy to ninety shelled almonds… hmm I like the thought of standing still at a speed of ninety AAH; (Almonds An Hour.)
I get a ride with a splendid chap called Mike who’s an attorney at law, one step away from being a judge. He likes: mountain biking, weed, peyote, rescuing messed up kids from a grossly inadequate judicial system, playing flamenco guitar (at the end of our day he plays it very well I discover), geology (a fountain of fascinating information), kitsch (we listen to cowboy film soundtracks as we head into Death Valley – very funny), the ‘Cows With Guns’ song – a pretty obscure anarco-folk song about armed revolutionary cows, and Kraftwerk. (Perfect for crossing the desolate Arizona desert afterwards.)
The journey into Paramint Valley, the most glorious, spectacular part of Death Valley just makes me laugh out loud, and not just because of the cowboy music.
At the bottom of the valley, we make camp. I go off for a little wander. I check out little badlands style hillocks which puff up and do weird things on the rare occasion that it rains, on account of the fact that they are made largely of bicarbonate of soda. They still look brown, but you can find whole whitened chunks of it lying about and in stream deposits. Weird.
After some camp-fire flamenco Mike sleeps in the car and me under yet another tree.
Death Valley is the lowest, hottest and driest area in North America.
Next day we drive out through the lowest point of all, an area called ‘Badwater’ and have to wait for twenty minutes whilst road works happen. There’s this poor guy who has to stand there in the middle of nowhere swapping round this ‘slow/stop’ sign every twenty minutes. I decide that this must be even worse than hitch-hiking, cos he doesn’t get to go anywhere.
Travelling out of the valley to the sound of Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express album, we climb up and up and up and out into the Arizona desert, which frankly I wouldn’t wish on anybody. It’s vast, bare, ugly and brown. It’s scattered with distant trailer parks. I don’t see any industry here and there’s certainly no agriculture; there’s barely a blade of grass anywhere. It’s horrible. Mike reckons they must be itinerant miners (abundant and multifarious mineral deposits), and if they are not doing that, then its probably crystal meth factories. At some point we pass a sign offering land for sale at 400 bucks an acre. Think I’ll pass on that.
We arrive at Las Vegas. (Mike calls it alternately ‘The Belly Of The Beast’ and ‘Lost Wages’.) I am figuring Roel and Floor might be here, but given their previous ability for procrastination and the hideousness of this place and their love of the countryside, instinct tells me that they aren’t here anyway. (I am right as I later find out.)
I change my mind about getting out here, and jump back into Mike’s car and he takes me on through more of the desperately unlovely Arizona desert.
There’s a place called ‘Drop City’ out here somewhere. It was a failed community which was based on the premise of building lots of geo-dome dwellings out of old car panels out in the middle of nowhere and dropping lots of acid. I wonder why it failed. I can’t imagine.
I say farewell to Mike at Kingman, which is the end of the famous Route 66.
Just as I am about to hitch-hike out of this place, a young woman with red hair beckons to me, and I go to talk to her.
‘Hey there! What you doin’? You a hitch-hiker?’ You want some coffee? Come on over I’ll make you some! You English? Hey wow!’
I go back to her motel room on the other side of the road, where she lives with her kid. He’s five, in bed and watching TV five inches from his face with the volume on too loud and eating crisps.
This place is straight out of the fifties, right down to the trapezoid schizoid flickering neon motel sign flanked by two sad palm trees. An empty swimming pool behind it.
She’s Uma Thurman. Gary Oldman is next door shooting up some home cooking…
There’s a number of characters involved in this scenario, a couple of whacked-out freaks who live upstairs who claim to have nothing going for themselves but ‘violent men and easy women’. They’re barrel of laughs (not), but I have dinner with them. There’s broken glass all over the floor.
Downstairs afterwards a nice intelligent skater called Tom is trying rescue Tanya (the red-haired mum) from this mess.
They’ve both popped various pills and drunk lots. He’s holding it together, and she’s trying to get into my knickers. Why is it that I hardly ever find myself attracted to people who want to get into my knickers? I dunno.
Tom actually seems like a very decent chap. He’s worked in inner city kids projects, and has written a book about hobo-riding the freight trains round the States, and bizarrely, he likes Citizen Fish and Subhumans. (Two very obscure English punk bands from near my home town.) This minor detail is incongruously close to home for me in an event that is otherwise like being in a crap cops ‘n’ guns TV thriller. I wish him well in his interesting predicament. (Rescuing messed up woman and kid vs. his non-committal traveller lifestyle.)
Halfway through the night, various dope deals are made, and various conversations ensue about burglary, fighting and getting drugs. Pretending to be asleep, I keep half an eye on my stuff. I ease myself out of the place early next morning, mumbling some unconvincing ‘cheerio’, not wanting to be noticed leaving anyway.
In terms of casual migration, It often seems that those that find ordinary life with the masses not to their taste have a habit of moving away and ending up clinging to the edges of places.
Kingman, being the ‘full-stop’ of the western end of the iconic Route 66, is clearly ‘The End of the Road’.
With all it’s rock and roll/Quentin Tarantino associations, my encounter with Tanya and her associates has a kind of inevitability about it.
Kingman has that horrible sticky vortex feeling dreaded by hitch-hikers. I try for the rest of the day to hitch out of this place. Taking all day, I finish shelling my nuts (well that’s some blessing), and walk about eight miles and still don’t get a ride.
I walk to the airport, only to find it closed, so I can’t find out if there is a bus out of this place. I am cold, tired, very smelly, my back is totally messed up after trying to sleep on freezing concrete and I don’t know how to get out of this hole. I sit down dejected and get my wits together.
The place is practically deserted. A pick-up truck rocks up. A nice chap asks me how I am, and I tell him ‘Not very good actually’.
He is very pleased to meet an Englishman and I am pleased to meet someone friendly and trustable and with the ride back into town that he gives me. It’s a sad irony that my Englishness is often a kind of ticket to celebrity in the States, whilst Americans on the whole are often treated with such guarded hostility back home.
I get the Greyhound out to Flagstaff, an altogether much much nicer little bohemian town near the southern side of the Grand Canyon. It has a university with free internet and a very friendly hostel which picks me up from the bus depot for free. A rubbish day ends the right way up.
The ride on the bus from Kingman is interesting. It’s full of the kind of people who can’t afford cars. A very regal Mexican chap in his fifties wearing a casual suit and a cowboy hat sits next to me, and has very good vibes though we don’t say much.
I sleep a bit, and then listen in on the conversation that is going on in the two seats behind me; a young black guy and a young woman talking about astrology, which turns into some deep stuff, with him reeling off his fears; mostly about whether he should fight for his country or whether he should stay home and marry his heavily-pregnant girlfriend. The woman tries to give him some answers. It’s very interesting, and none of my damn business.
It’s kind of odd that a black guy is so keen to fight for a country which has regarded blacks as second class citizens even within his own parents’ lifetime.
I’ve spent about three days at the Flagstaff hostel, sleeping a lot, and taking full advantage of their free breakfast option. Lots and lots of fruit and jam on toast.
I almost feel ready to go and see this Grand Canyon thing; I think when I arrived here, if I had gone out again I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. I’m a bit sceneried-out. That’s cool; after the Grand Canyon I should be ready to go to Taos, New Mexico, which I found out on the backpacker’s grapevine is not only ‘a very nice place’, but also where Georgia O’Keefe lived/came from.
I’ve been feeling a bit lost and missing Sofie a bit; I guess I just need to get my energy back, write all this up and send it off (it has the effect of letting go of it all, which is good for my head), and I’ve bean sprout production back in full swing. Okay! What’s Next?? Oh yeah, the Grand Canyon…
I really should have gone back to bed and got my energy back, but instead I go to a highland music thing with Chris (a female office clerk from Bicester) and then spend the rest of the evening drinking, complete with Steve (from Peterborough, England) and Avery (from Ohio) who are verbally acting out all their sexual fantasies all over Chris, which is surprising to say the least and bluer than the deep blue sea. Chris seems to find it quite flattering on her ego.
Next morning I’ve got a god-awful hangover, and me and Chris pick up her hire car and do a whizz-bang 600 mile round trip grockle-style tour of Monument Valley. I am truly awed by the stunningly peaceful and beautiful colours when we actually bother to stop anywhere and actually breathe in this place, Chris being keener to do the rocket-paced thing.
We reach our penultimate destination: the Four Corners landmark (where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico all meet together). We think about playing inter-state twister but instead pose in lewd ways for each others photos.
We buy Navajo fry bread, which pretty much is Yorkshire pudding. Maybe Yorkshire pudding is a global psychological archetype. I like to think so. In deepest darkest Congo, they’ll be eating Yorkshire Pudding for tea. In communist China they are wearing their grey uniforms and eating Yorkshire Pudding. In antarctica the penguins are all noshing on Yorkshire Pudding. Okay I don’t suppose they are. Anyway, the Navajo fry bread is very good of course.
This Four Corners place is odd. The meeting points of a white man’s map. Actually a lot of Arizona is spectacularly odd. The four states marker is a big brass thing inlaid in concrete with a wide ring of native traders stalls cobbled together largely out of plywood, sensitively obliterating the view.
Actually, beyond that, the scraggy desert out of the corner of one eye bears more than a passing resemblance to a large quarry or an empty landfill site. I mention this to Chris and she agrees with me. We reckon we’ve both got scenery overload. Apart from this little insight, it crosses my mind what a spectacularly desperate place this must be to try to live in. All the dust and rocks you can eat. What spectacularly ungenerous people the American government have been to give the Native Americans this seemingly dreadful scrap of land to exist on.
After the deliberate cheesy tourist approach we feel hugely incongruously appropriate to this particular site (it’s all Chris’s doing honest), we zoom off another thousand, sorry, 100-odd miles through more sublime desert and weird outcroppy rock things.
The area is smattered with little bits of ‘res’ (reservation settlements), that have names like ‘Many Farms’ and ‘Mexican Hat’. We figure Mexican Hat is named after a particular outcrop of rock which is a pointy thing with a boulder and then a flat slab on top. Doesn’t really look like a Mexican Hat that much. They should have called it ‘funny-slab-on-a-blobby-rock’. They would have done that if it was England I’m sure.
We see lots of freshly killed dogs on the roads that have yet to be gobbled up by the local carrion. (Ravens I expect.) There should be at least one place called Dead Dog. Maybe I’ll start up an intentional community back home and call it that in memory of the experience. The rocks are weird and orange, the sky huge wide and blue and the air thick with quiet. This is an astonishing part of the world, but it doesn’t look like you could grow a darned thing here.
We arrive at the petrified forest park off the I-40 with five minutes to spare before closing. The park attendant in her little booth lets us in for free on condition that we pass through without stopping, which of course we pay absolutely no heed to at all having come all this way. The park consists of a ten mile drive with various view points which look out over fossilly things we’ve already seen for free. When we eventually reach the strange forest remains, our greedy tourist appetites are at last sated. Laying down like tree trunks that have broken into chunks upon impact with the ground, and scattered like the fallen pillars of a Pompei Colosseum, these ‘rocks’ are unlike any fossils we have ever seen. Much of the surface round the trunks still looks like shiny hardened bark and wood fibre, even after 250 million years. Across the rings, there are some fabulous works of ancient abstract art. The rings are worked into bands of different colours; greys, whites, red, pale blue and lilac. As hard as we look at them, we can’t figure out in the slightest how these colours have managed to appear sometimes random and sometimes banded. Weird.
Dusk arrived, and we set off to complete this 600 mile loop back to Flagstaff.
Chris is very refreshing to be with, having so many common reference points really makes a nice change from what has become my usual. We talk about sex and relationships on the way home. Very good. When we get back we realise how tired we are and totally flake out in our respective boudoirs.
I’m still full of snot, wiped out and not sleeping. Next morning I go off on the fifty dollar bus trip and tour of the Grand Canyon. I was going to do it unaided and for free, but I’m too wiped out for that. Money is for spending, so I take it easy.
On board is Julie, from London, a healery type who’s bouncing round the States doing new-agey therapy courses on a wodge of money she won from some Reader’s Digest type thing (‘It was obviously my destiny!’), Steve from Dorking, an estate agent with a skinhead haircut and a big navy-bred personality. Very decent chap, even if he does too much talking for my liking once in the Canyon. Nadia, twenty, from Eastern Australia somewhere, a young mousy first love couple from my home town of Reading who are very quiet and coy, another quiet and coy Ozzie bloke who looks like the main character from ‘Shine’, and Leona from Darwin in Australia who looks about forty-five-ish and is great fun.
Leona looks dapper in tweeds and coming from tropical Darwin she’s feeling the cold a bit. Talking to Leona is hilarious. She talks and I just grin at her.
‘What? What are you grinning at?’
‘I’ve got to come to Australia!’
‘Why’s that then?’
‘I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about!’
‘Oh – well – what I am saying is … (blah blah blah)’
I didn’t realise it, but Australia has its own slang different from English slang. Unwittingly, Leona is trying to explain her slang with other equally bizarre sayings. She must think I’ve got kangaroos in my top paddock. My favourite expression is a piece of Aussie abuse: ‘I hope your ears turn into arseholes and they shit all over your shoulders.’
The Grand Canyon.
Well – you already know what it looks like.
After a spot of lunch, we take the South Kaibab trail down to the halfway point from the bottom. I race off ahead so I can savour the too short time that we spend down here, away from the chattering classes behind me – I’ve come here to feel something of this place, not listen to Steve from Dorking banging on loudly about his mortgage repayments…
It’s beautiful, we’re all in the middle of it blissed out and tired and the stunningly tranquil vibe has got the better of Steve. Our guide Tim is a quiet hiker type who I instantly like. The walk back up is not as hard as I thought it would be, after seeing the knackered faces that have come into the hostel previously. I guess carrying twelve tons of rucksack every day must be doing me some good then. I am surprised how okay I feel, considering my general wiped-outness.
We all go out for a Thai meal that night to complete the group thing. A nice big plate of hot chilli to blast the crap out of me (hopefully).
The next day I sleep lots, and Julie does her healy thing on me, and Leona gives me a load of Chinese medicine which thankfully is easier to deal with than the dried rats legs and tree bark that Chinese medicine often seems to be.
I am going to go back up to the Canyon again, but in my current state I think I’d be asking for trouble.
Me and Julie go out for another Thai meal and on the way we spot an old drunk who has collapsed near the rails just off the railroad crossing on the way. We pull him up and literally two minutes later a sodding great train comes thundering through. He thanks us for saving his life. (We didn’t really, though it would have scared the crap out of him having the train come by so close to him.)
Two drunk Native Americans do some wobbly ritual to bless us all, and then they tap us for a couple of dollars each. It’s a strange encounter. One of them tells Julie his phone number in an offer to continue his blessings…
Next day after no sleep yet again; snot, dry throat, thundering tooting trains ALL night (every night; warning drunks to get off the track I guess), me and Julie say our goodbyes, and I get a lift up to the I-40 where I can look forward to an afternoon of sitting doing nothing waiting for a ride either for a long time or not long at all, which actually seems at the moment like a win-win situation.
I get picked up by BoDale, a young guy driving his dad home. He’s an utter freak. Full of a mixture of ecological concern, hatred of almost everybody, Masonic/governmental/alien conspiracy theories and then seems to have a certain amount of respectful insight into whole groups of people that I previously imagined that he hated. One thing he tells me I vow to him I will write down because it is so cranky:
He and his sister used to keep rabbits, and one was born with two heads, but was almost dead. His sister tried to revive it by putting it in the microwave.
This story seemed to sum up this strange mixture of off-the-wall goodwill that this guy has.
Strange road sign spotted en route-
‘Meteorites! 50% off!’
After he drops his dad off at home in Holbrook (desert trailer trash central) he buys me dinner and tells me how he’s hooked up on speed, crack and heroin.
Bodale’s life thus far has been financed by trading hard drugs and ‘native trinkets’;
He goes down to ‘a gap in the fence’ on the US/Mexican border and buys drugs, which he pays for in a combination of cash and items made by the Navajo Indians. He then returns to the Navajo, sells them their drugs and barters for more trinkets.
He feels totally trapped by his circumstances and wants to make something of his life. He talks about getting out into the world more and finding new opportunities.
I tell him about WWOOF; World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. A network that offers learning and experience about lovely Green lifestyles in exchange for about five hours a day labour. You get good food and a nice place to stay, meet nice people and learn genuinely useful skills whilst doing them. It costs twenty-five pounds a year to join and apart from that it’s free. And there are thousands of hosts all over the world.
Very handy if your life’s gone up Shit Creek.
We drive on and at some point he informs me that he doesn’t have enough gas to go any further. Knowing that I want to get to Albuquerque, he offers to take me there if I can pay for the extra gas.
February 14th industrial site, Albuquerque. Almost full moon.
I sleep out in an industrial estate and am quite warm for a change. I have a strange feeling of peacefulness. I think it’s from still being a bit ill and my ears are bunged up.
Just had a freaky ride into town. Bush has issued an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to show him where the Weapons of Mass Destruction are hidden and everyone’s waiting for the war to start.
The driver is paranoid about what Al Qaeda might do to him when Bush finally kicks off. The Christians are getting holier-than-thou and maybe it’s the ‘End Days’. The government has put the country on Orange Alert from terrorist attacks. The guy giving me my lift stops for gas and discusses with another stranger at the gas pump possible tactics for defending themselves from ‘Those Crazy Towelheads’.
Okay. This is all too weird.
I decide to abandon the Earthship thing in Taos to get out of the States sooner rather than later, I don’t think I can tolerate any more American paranoia. Either I go to Brazil with Sofie, or I go to Australia directly. Dunno.
If we travel through Central America will we get mistaken for Americans and get shot by the locals? Maybe paranoia is an infectious disease…
I get into Albuquerque and try to find a travel agent, but can’t find one open cos it’s Saturday. I go to a library to see what I can find out on the net. Greyhound bus is 135 bucks to LA, sixty-five bucks if I wait three days…
Albuquerque is a very pretty city – Hispanic architecture is really different – lots of soft marshmallowy-looking concrete squares, cubes and zig-zags with lots of mural paintings and street art. I like Albuquerque. I have lunch in a groovy cafe playing wonderful funky jazz on the stereo. I ask the manager who the music is being made by. It’s The Rebirth Brass Band ‘Rebirth B. B. Kickin’ it Live’ on Rounder Records and a brass band rapper called Coolbone (V. Good!)
I get a bus back out to the freeway and attempt to hitch back out west. Totally crap.
I go to Wild Oats Health Store at dusk and discover a better cheaper bus to LA going tomorrow, courtesy of the good people who work in the store. Also I find MARMITE! I buy two jars, and also some turkey jerky, just so I can have the opportunity to say:
‘I bought turkey jerky in Albuquerque; how quirky.’
I stay in the shop writing this and reading free health magazines until 9.30pm and then go and sleep behind a pile of pallets behind K-Mart on the other side of the road.
I get into town the next morning by the skin of my teeth just in time to get the LA bus which even though it’s much cheaper than the other bus, first travels east several hundred miles via El Paso in Texas before heading back to L.A. How’s that for a roundabout route?
The rest of New Mexico and the little bit of Texas I see is nasty desert. Some people really like desert. I don’t get it. To me its the geographical equivalent of Artexed ceilings.
El Paso is pretty big, poor looking and industrial in a digging the ground up and wrecking it kind of way.
El Paso is probably one of the seediest, grimiest low-down places I have ever accidentally found myself in. I have a wait of about two hours, which is about as long as I would want to stay here. I am certainly glad that I don’t need to stay over-night. The place just feels like it is in a permanent state of crime waiting to happen. I leave before any does.
Boarding a bus is sometimes the cue for a gut-felt feeling of sadness about leaving, sometimes mild excitement about what might be coming next. Sometimes its gratitude to be safely out from inclement weather, of rain or cold.
This time it’s a sense of mild relief mixed with a sort of worn-down reticence about making yet another super-long distance haul across country, made worse by the fact that I am going back exactly the same way I just came; an almost completely pointless act of arse-aching travel.
The ride back to LA is long and uneventful, but for about half an hour when I calculate that I must be roughly in the area of Roswell, home of UFO/government conspiracy theories; there is a strange blob hanging motionless in the sky, which then slowly drifts off somewhere. I am really hoping that it would zoom off at some impossible speed, then I would be certain that I have had a Close Encounter of some kind.
I arrive in LA at 5 am Duh! Seems like it’s been National Make No Sense Day… I get the bus up to Bakersfield just north of LA, look at my emails to see if Sofie had dropped me a phone number… Nope, but she does seem to be heading out of the US pretty quickly too…
I make various abortive attempts to find out what the phone number where she’s staying is, fail, start to get stressed, stop, eat pizza, buy a ticket to Sacramento, then cancel it – I have this nasty feeling I am going to find out where Sofie is a day late and it will all be a stress nightmare anyway.
I change direction and get me a ticket back through LA and down to San Diego. And then remember that I’ve got a load of pre-Central American preparing to do: get Larium (anti-malaria drugs that sometimes either give you psychedelic dreams or make you psychotic), buy a Spanish phrasebook, a guidebook, things like that. Argh! Next stop, land of linguistic incomprehension. This will be interesting in the Chinese sense. At least I’m less likely to get anthraxed.
February 20th
I have been in San Diego for three days sorting things out. I meet a guy from New Zealand who’s been all round Central America and South America for two years (carrying nothing but a small leather shoulder bag too). By virtue of just being here being able to talk to me, i.e. being alive, he puts a lot of my worries to rest.
Sofie’s doing her own thing, which makes most sense, and she gives me loads of WWOOF addresses in Central America. This is fab as I now have somewhere to aim at.
I meet a big round chap outside the library who runs a coffee and bagel stall who when I ask him why he has a computer and a digital camera with him, tells me he’s using the stall as a basis for a book about all the people he meets whilst he’s running the stall. I take a picture of him and tell him that now he’s in my story.
I’m in the hostel, there are lots of people writing travel journals – I feel sorry for publishers.
The militaristic gung-ho attitude here is starting to really wind me up; the media reports are so one-sided it’s just plain manipulation and not many people seem to see it. Scary and crazy. I’m outta here, and if anyone asks; I’m Canadian.
I finally get to get out of this super-affluent cosy fluffy dollar bills glass and chrome skyscrapery place in about an hour.
Richard Terry 