Monday, December 26, 2005
Good ol' fashioned family holiday - Part II
Post-Christmas:
The Death Valley Suite
Movement 1: 12/26/00 - Andante non specifico
twas the day after christmas
and all along the road
not a creature was stirring
not even a toad
the desert was intensely beige
the panorama vast
the highway, lined with desert sage,
made me drive too fast...
...the desert is a sleeping leviathan, the Loch Ness monster encrusted in sand. Sometimes it becomes so quiet that you can hear its shallow breathing...
We made our way north up I-127, which slices through eastern California, breaks free into Nevada, then dips back into California somewhere just north of Death Valley, our destination. The drive, as with all drives in the desert, was monotonous and trance-inducing. Somewhere in the upper right quadrant of my brain, a cryptic twist of circuitry was making sense of the ragged tattoo my tires were rolling out on the erratically rutted road.
Lynnie said Eric had stayed at the Phoenix Inn in Beatty, Nevada, just northeast of Death Valley, and it goes without saying that I was leery of the prospect due to Eric’s previous praise of the sulfurous Royal Hawaiian in Baker. But the Phoenix turned out to be an okay joint: basically a plot of well-maintained double-wides, with three moderately spacious rooms on either side of each. Beatty is an almost transparent tiny desert town, full of people adept at hiding in plain sight. It’s the kind of place with a bulletin board at the general store with notices reading, “Excellent double-wide with redecorated wet bar on 1.5 acres: $12,500.” Double-wides are the thing in Beatty. The really poor people live in the ramshackle 19th century houses that line the few streets, relics of Beatty’s shortlived heyday as a silver mining town in the 1880s. My favorite dwellings, though, were a heady grouping of really old mobile homes just west of our motel, squatting biomorphically amongst 50-year-old weeds, adventure pods grounded for good on an alien planet, their hopeful floral curtains faded and frayed, TV antennas growing out of them at odd, jointed angles like eyes on long-forgotten potatoes.
Before checking in at the Phoenix, we went a little further on to Rhyolite, a ghost town/outdoor art gallery a few minutes south of Beatty, where, in the 1980s, a visiting European artist created a series of white fiberglass molds of flowing robes around non-existent bodies that float like ghosts above the rubble of the slowly decaying townsite. I almost got stuck in one, as the model the artist used for these robes was deceivingly much smaller than I. Lynnie took a picture of me in my confined state. When I was little, my mother took a picture of me when I got stuck in the pots-and-pans cupboard. Trapped Rob–a photographic theme in my life.
Back in town, we had lunch at the Burro Inn, one of Beatty’s three casinos, and its most down-home of the batch. Country music blared over the ring-a-dinging of slot machines, and obese strip miners in Harley shirts downed their post-shift burgers and six packs while a stone-carved retired couple stared at us apprehensively over their grilled cheese sandwiches. I had a glass of “burgandy” (two dollars) and a spicy chicken sandwich, while Lynnie began her desert marathon of hamburgers and dinner salads with “blue cheese” dressing, which more often than not a little too closely resembled the house standard, ranch. Waitresses in Beatty, we found, were uniformly bovine. They’d stand around chewing their cuds, and if you happened to be lucky enough to catch one of them scanning the room from the corner of her eye, she’d give you that scared, but aggressive, cow stare, then pretend she didn’t see you and resume rumination. It’s all part of the plodding haphazardness to which desert life is prone, especially Nevada desert life, which is far more abstract than its California counterpart.
The office guy at the Phoenix had told us about this spectacular canyon that we had to see at sunset, which is when we found out that you really need a four-wheel drive (a “high-profile vehicle” in local parlance) if you want to do Death Valley right. We went about a mile on a “gravel” road, according to the map, whose large jagged rocks could have been considered gravel, I guess, by some race of beings about fifty times our size. After much bone-rattling we eventually turned around and enjoyed the sunset from the freeway, whose gentle dips and curves we got to know like our own nervous systems (which is to say sporadically, in spurts of recognition), over the next few days. We explored Stovepipe Wells, one of Death Valley’s three mini-resorts, and had a drink in the bar, where Lynnie played a selection of raunchy 70s hard-rock on the jukebox, but decided not to eat in the restaurant: Death Valley’s version of good food runs the suburban haute cuisine gamut from Chicken Cordon Bleu to Trout Amandine; my mind filled with unpleasant images of extra-large Lean Cuisine packages in industrial-sized microwaves.
To escape the upscale redneck tone of the Wells, we left the park and went way low down, to dinner at the Sourdough Saloon, Beatty’s answer to Cheers, where everbody knows your name--because they're all the same: The bartender was a butch number named Deb, the resident cute n’ giggly chick went by Debbie, and the dark-haired siren with the leathery tan and slim cigarettes at the end of the bar preferred Deborah. Deb made killer Bloody Mary's with tons of horseradish, and we sipped them between bites of a large sausage and jalapeno pizza, of which I ate the lion’s share. Conversation at the bar was halting and monosyllabic, but somehow full of camaraderie, and we became momentary stars when Debbie asked us where we were from, sending the whole room into an inexplicably frenzied hoot and holler over the fact that we hailed from L.A. At least we left them laughing.
Thirty degrees was the temperature, I’d guess, as we walked back across a few vacant lots to the Phoenix. The sky was full of stars, but what did my eyes land on first in the midst of this great sparkle? Orion. Why do I always see Orion, no matter the season or time of night--or even part of the world? “Plastered to the sky with dislike” is what I used to say about him, meaning me. It wasn’t quite dislike, though, that night; no, something more like patient watchfulness.
Categories: art, family, holidays, travel, backstory
The Death Valley Suite
Movement 1: 12/26/00 - Andante non specifico
twas the day after christmas
and all along the road
not a creature was stirring
not even a toad
the desert was intensely beige
the panorama vast
the highway, lined with desert sage,
made me drive too fast...
...the desert is a sleeping leviathan, the Loch Ness monster encrusted in sand. Sometimes it becomes so quiet that you can hear its shallow breathing...
We made our way north up I-127, which slices through eastern California, breaks free into Nevada, then dips back into California somewhere just north of Death Valley, our destination. The drive, as with all drives in the desert, was monotonous and trance-inducing. Somewhere in the upper right quadrant of my brain, a cryptic twist of circuitry was making sense of the ragged tattoo my tires were rolling out on the erratically rutted road.
Lynnie said Eric had stayed at the Phoenix Inn in Beatty, Nevada, just northeast of Death Valley, and it goes without saying that I was leery of the prospect due to Eric’s previous praise of the sulfurous Royal Hawaiian in Baker. But the Phoenix turned out to be an okay joint: basically a plot of well-maintained double-wides, with three moderately spacious rooms on either side of each. Beatty is an almost transparent tiny desert town, full of people adept at hiding in plain sight. It’s the kind of place with a bulletin board at the general store with notices reading, “Excellent double-wide with redecorated wet bar on 1.5 acres: $12,500.” Double-wides are the thing in Beatty. The really poor people live in the ramshackle 19th century houses that line the few streets, relics of Beatty’s shortlived heyday as a silver mining town in the 1880s. My favorite dwellings, though, were a heady grouping of really old mobile homes just west of our motel, squatting biomorphically amongst 50-year-old weeds, adventure pods grounded for good on an alien planet, their hopeful floral curtains faded and frayed, TV antennas growing out of them at odd, jointed angles like eyes on long-forgotten potatoes.
Before checking in at the Phoenix, we went a little further on to Rhyolite, a ghost town/outdoor art gallery a few minutes south of Beatty, where, in the 1980s, a visiting European artist created a series of white fiberglass molds of flowing robes around non-existent bodies that float like ghosts above the rubble of the slowly decaying townsite. I almost got stuck in one, as the model the artist used for these robes was deceivingly much smaller than I. Lynnie took a picture of me in my confined state. When I was little, my mother took a picture of me when I got stuck in the pots-and-pans cupboard. Trapped Rob–a photographic theme in my life.
Back in town, we had lunch at the Burro Inn, one of Beatty’s three casinos, and its most down-home of the batch. Country music blared over the ring-a-dinging of slot machines, and obese strip miners in Harley shirts downed their post-shift burgers and six packs while a stone-carved retired couple stared at us apprehensively over their grilled cheese sandwiches. I had a glass of “burgandy” (two dollars) and a spicy chicken sandwich, while Lynnie began her desert marathon of hamburgers and dinner salads with “blue cheese” dressing, which more often than not a little too closely resembled the house standard, ranch. Waitresses in Beatty, we found, were uniformly bovine. They’d stand around chewing their cuds, and if you happened to be lucky enough to catch one of them scanning the room from the corner of her eye, she’d give you that scared, but aggressive, cow stare, then pretend she didn’t see you and resume rumination. It’s all part of the plodding haphazardness to which desert life is prone, especially Nevada desert life, which is far more abstract than its California counterpart.
The office guy at the Phoenix had told us about this spectacular canyon that we had to see at sunset, which is when we found out that you really need a four-wheel drive (a “high-profile vehicle” in local parlance) if you want to do Death Valley right. We went about a mile on a “gravel” road, according to the map, whose large jagged rocks could have been considered gravel, I guess, by some race of beings about fifty times our size. After much bone-rattling we eventually turned around and enjoyed the sunset from the freeway, whose gentle dips and curves we got to know like our own nervous systems (which is to say sporadically, in spurts of recognition), over the next few days. We explored Stovepipe Wells, one of Death Valley’s three mini-resorts, and had a drink in the bar, where Lynnie played a selection of raunchy 70s hard-rock on the jukebox, but decided not to eat in the restaurant: Death Valley’s version of good food runs the suburban haute cuisine gamut from Chicken Cordon Bleu to Trout Amandine; my mind filled with unpleasant images of extra-large Lean Cuisine packages in industrial-sized microwaves.
To escape the upscale redneck tone of the Wells, we left the park and went way low down, to dinner at the Sourdough Saloon, Beatty’s answer to Cheers, where everbody knows your name--because they're all the same: The bartender was a butch number named Deb, the resident cute n’ giggly chick went by Debbie, and the dark-haired siren with the leathery tan and slim cigarettes at the end of the bar preferred Deborah. Deb made killer Bloody Mary's with tons of horseradish, and we sipped them between bites of a large sausage and jalapeno pizza, of which I ate the lion’s share. Conversation at the bar was halting and monosyllabic, but somehow full of camaraderie, and we became momentary stars when Debbie asked us where we were from, sending the whole room into an inexplicably frenzied hoot and holler over the fact that we hailed from L.A. At least we left them laughing.
Thirty degrees was the temperature, I’d guess, as we walked back across a few vacant lots to the Phoenix. The sky was full of stars, but what did my eyes land on first in the midst of this great sparkle? Orion. Why do I always see Orion, no matter the season or time of night--or even part of the world? “Plastered to the sky with dislike” is what I used to say about him, meaning me. It wasn’t quite dislike, though, that night; no, something more like patient watchfulness.
Categories: art, family, holidays, travel, backstory
