Friday, December 30, 2005
Good ol' fashioned family holiday - Part VI
12/30/00 - A peek through the interstices
Lynnie and I proceeded from Ridgecrest to spend New Year’s Eve weekend at a gathering (with a group called Integral, to which Jon had recently introduced me) in Red Canyon Wash in the far east quadrant of the southern Mojave Desert badlands. For those of you who don’t quite know what I mean by “gathering,” you can call it a rave, but with the caveat that every rave has its own unique personality, like every person who attends. The gatherings I’ve been going to lately have been small and intimate, mostly centered around psytrance music, more casual and adult than the raves you hear about in the news and such, with the implicit goal being to create a collective alternate universe during the time we have together. Another useful way to think about it in “mainstream” terms is as a miniature Burning Man without the effigy. To maintain a certain amount of privacy, these gatherings are always held in places that are out of the way and often difficult to get to. This was no exception.
We blasted Heart’s Greatest Hits on the way down to the I-10 and out to Indio. “Even it up, even it up, even it out, baby!,” we screamed along; “Ah-oooh-yeah-ah...BARRACUDA!!” At dusk we bought a styrofoam ice chest, packed it with the perishable part of a hundred-thirty dollars worth of low-prep groceries, and stuffed everything into the remaining space in the back of my teensy car. It was already filled with our luggage, camping supplies, and booty from the Goodwill in Ridgecrest, which we had raided before beginning on our way. There we had greatly enlarged our party gear trousseau with a grey corduroy blazer, a teal prom dress, a sparkly Indian tunic, a magenta and green Vera scarf, a fuzzy red Maude vest and three feather-disk wig-caps a la Liz Taylor 1970 or so, none eventually worn–but it’s always nice to have options. We’d also bought a little folding chair and a needlepoint sampler, still in its circular workframe, reading “Orange Marmalade,” with a juicy Seville in a rustic floral halo.
About ten miles off the freeway, we met up with a U-Haul and a motorhome looking for the same party on the confusing circuitry of roads, and, at a crossroads, we held a small debate about which way to go. We decided to turn right. After a mile or so, it became evident that the road we were on was actually more of a motocross track. The U-Haul and the motorhome got stuck there, but my faithful little Doris Daewoo made it out across the moon-like terrain, and we reported the lost souls to the gathering organizers when we finally arrived in the right place: a gently winding canyon about a mile or so in length, with sheer, brittle walls of a hundred feet, about a hundred feet apart. Notice the name: Red Canyon WASH. Luckily there was no sign of rain in the extended forecast.
Jon was already there, along with his friend Will and the two women we’d met on Christmas day, the potato cookers, Natalie and Elena. They fed us beef stew, and we wandered around the grounds, checking out our temporary home. At first I thought the girls were stuck up, and they thought I was obnoxious (we discussed later, with much laughter about the often erroneous quality of first impressions),
but we warmed to each other by the end of the night, and the six of us formed a nice little shared hearth camp. We also had private sleeping domains far flung from one another. Natalie and Elena had settled in pristine silence way back in a tributary canyon, where the non-stop whump-thump of psy-trance couldn’t reach them. Jon and Will were at the end of the canyon in one of the few campsites where, not only were you close to the sound, but the speakers were pointed right at you. That was a little too intense for me, so Lynnie and I set up down the road. We christened our camp by hanging the “Orange Marmalade” needlepoint on our tent just as the dusky night went pitch dark. Settling down to sleep, I soon realized that our peaceful little suburb was far more hopping than I had imagined it would be, full of bubbly chatter and private late-night boombox grooves.
I decided around five A.M. on New Year’s Eve morning that I was, in fact, not going to sleep before dawn, and probably would not sleep the whole weekend. After a few dramatic moments of utter distress over the prospect of such sleeplessness, during which I wrung my hands and pulled at my hair like an actress in a bad horror movie, I bundled up and walked to the dead end of the wash, where a grove of boulders connected to the riverbed above through a damp grotto fashioned by their interstices. I sat on the highest rock and watched the sky turn pink over the faraway mountains, doing my best to fade away and radiate.
Categories: backstory, family, friends, holidays, travel, psychedelic, music
Lynnie and I proceeded from Ridgecrest to spend New Year’s Eve weekend at a gathering (with a group called Integral, to which Jon had recently introduced me) in Red Canyon Wash in the far east quadrant of the southern Mojave Desert badlands. For those of you who don’t quite know what I mean by “gathering,” you can call it a rave, but with the caveat that every rave has its own unique personality, like every person who attends. The gatherings I’ve been going to lately have been small and intimate, mostly centered around psytrance music, more casual and adult than the raves you hear about in the news and such, with the implicit goal being to create a collective alternate universe during the time we have together. Another useful way to think about it in “mainstream” terms is as a miniature Burning Man without the effigy. To maintain a certain amount of privacy, these gatherings are always held in places that are out of the way and often difficult to get to. This was no exception.
We blasted Heart’s Greatest Hits on the way down to the I-10 and out to Indio. “Even it up, even it up, even it out, baby!,” we screamed along; “Ah-oooh-yeah-ah...BARRACUDA!!” At dusk we bought a styrofoam ice chest, packed it with the perishable part of a hundred-thirty dollars worth of low-prep groceries, and stuffed everything into the remaining space in the back of my teensy car. It was already filled with our luggage, camping supplies, and booty from the Goodwill in Ridgecrest, which we had raided before beginning on our way. There we had greatly enlarged our party gear trousseau with a grey corduroy blazer, a teal prom dress, a sparkly Indian tunic, a magenta and green Vera scarf, a fuzzy red Maude vest and three feather-disk wig-caps a la Liz Taylor 1970 or so, none eventually worn–but it’s always nice to have options. We’d also bought a little folding chair and a needlepoint sampler, still in its circular workframe, reading “Orange Marmalade,” with a juicy Seville in a rustic floral halo.
About ten miles off the freeway, we met up with a U-Haul and a motorhome looking for the same party on the confusing circuitry of roads, and, at a crossroads, we held a small debate about which way to go. We decided to turn right. After a mile or so, it became evident that the road we were on was actually more of a motocross track. The U-Haul and the motorhome got stuck there, but my faithful little Doris Daewoo made it out across the moon-like terrain, and we reported the lost souls to the gathering organizers when we finally arrived in the right place: a gently winding canyon about a mile or so in length, with sheer, brittle walls of a hundred feet, about a hundred feet apart. Notice the name: Red Canyon WASH. Luckily there was no sign of rain in the extended forecast.
Jon was already there, along with his friend Will and the two women we’d met on Christmas day, the potato cookers, Natalie and Elena. They fed us beef stew, and we wandered around the grounds, checking out our temporary home. At first I thought the girls were stuck up, and they thought I was obnoxious (we discussed later, with much laughter about the often erroneous quality of first impressions),
but we warmed to each other by the end of the night, and the six of us formed a nice little shared hearth camp. We also had private sleeping domains far flung from one another. Natalie and Elena had settled in pristine silence way back in a tributary canyon, where the non-stop whump-thump of psy-trance couldn’t reach them. Jon and Will were at the end of the canyon in one of the few campsites where, not only were you close to the sound, but the speakers were pointed right at you. That was a little too intense for me, so Lynnie and I set up down the road. We christened our camp by hanging the “Orange Marmalade” needlepoint on our tent just as the dusky night went pitch dark. Settling down to sleep, I soon realized that our peaceful little suburb was far more hopping than I had imagined it would be, full of bubbly chatter and private late-night boombox grooves.I decided around five A.M. on New Year’s Eve morning that I was, in fact, not going to sleep before dawn, and probably would not sleep the whole weekend. After a few dramatic moments of utter distress over the prospect of such sleeplessness, during which I wrung my hands and pulled at my hair like an actress in a bad horror movie, I bundled up and walked to the dead end of the wash, where a grove of boulders connected to the riverbed above through a damp grotto fashioned by their interstices. I sat on the highest rock and watched the sky turn pink over the faraway mountains, doing my best to fade away and radiate.
Categories: backstory, family, friends, holidays, travel, psychedelic, music
