September 6, 2013 the great dental adventure of 2012, part 4
This post is part of a series. To read the first post, click here. To see more Dental Adventure photos, click here.
A TOWN CALLED QUARTZSITE
Our route from Palm Canyon took us next to Quartzsite, Arizona, where snowbird RVs congregate in the winter months. Bev is usually one of those snowbirds, and the first day of January finds her leaving Santa Cruz, bound for drier and warmer weather. The Quartzsite she sees then is different from the one we visited in April. In January the place is thronged with over 250,000 temporary residents, and the small town becomes the scene of giant swap meets, flea markets, gem and mineral shows, and crazy desert hijinks. Over 1.5 million people visit annually. By April, the population has dropped down to 3,500 or so, and the flea markets are gone, though some vendors remain here and there.
This town out in the middle of nowhere began as a fort built by Charley Tyson in 1856 to guard his water supply against Mohave-Apache raids. The fort became a stop on the California-Arizona stagecoach line because it had a well, and eventually, supplies for travelers. An adobe stagecoach station was built by Tyson in 1866, and the place was named Tyson's Well. The end of the stagecoach business caused the budding town to be almost abandoned. Then, around 1897, the King of Arizona (aka Kofa) mine, among others, attracted prospectors to the area and gave the town a brief boost for a couple of years. By then Tyson's Well had been renamed Quartzsite, based on an error by the Post Office; the name wasn't supposed to have the 's'. The word "quartzite" refers to a rock made of quartz grains; the word "quartzsite" means a place where quartz is found. Both words may be accurate, but only one is the intended name. As you might imagine, this mistake has led to years of spelling confusion.
After the brief turn-of-the-century mining surge, Quartzsite's population waned again until the arrival of the Atlantic and Pacific Highway in 1910 or so. Becoming a stop on the journey from one ocean to another helped the town grow a bit, but it wasn't until 1967, when the Quartzsite Improvement Association hosted the first Pow Wow Gem & Mineral Show, that the huge annual crowds began to appear. Camping is cheap on the BLM land around town, and winter pilgrimages to Quartzsite became common among retirees and those who live in their RVs. In spring and summer the seasonal residents are gone, and the bones of the town are exposed: a handful of local businesses, plus miles of desert scrub, empty lots, and deteriorating buildings.
We stopped at the Main Street Laundromat, where hot showers are offered at a reasonable rate. While Bev napped in the RV, Sundari and I collected our quarters and headed inside to get clean. I remember that episode vividly as one of the best showers of my life. Perhaps because I hadn't bathed since right before my final dentist visit in Los Algodones, I came out of that building feeling like I had shed my old skin after a long struggle.
Outside of town, the empty BLM land extended far in all directions. We camped in one of the many open areas, and I felt like I was continuing a process that had begun with my cleansing experience that afternoon. We had no neighbors within sight of us, no restrictions on how much space we could occupy. I set up my Tent Cot far away from the RV. After watching yet another preposterously beautiful desert sunset, I crawled in and lay there feeling the expanse of air around me. All night long my dream self walked around tossing out heavy intangibles. Quartzsite and its environs felt like a vast plain where I could unpack a lot of mental baggage and just leave it there, to be blown away by the desert winds, or maybe picked up and sold in some ghostly flea market, the otherworldly version of the yearly Quartzsite sales extravaganza.
The next morning I woke up feeling lighter, ready to collect new information. I packed up my Tent Cot, grabbed my camera, and roamed alone, far across the trackless wilds of the BLM. It was easy to get disoriented out there where one wash looked like another. I was lost for a while, but then I spotted a huge saguaro I'd seen before and used it to navigate my way back to our site. I was just in time to hop aboard the RV as Bev prepared to depart, and soon we were heading north on US 95 towards Parker, Arizona.
CHILLAXING ON THE PARKER STRIP
Our home for the night was the parking lot of the BlueWater Resort and Casino, where RVs could, of course, park for free. Here was another slice of Colorado River life, this one very different from our previous experience. BlueWater Resort was much bigger than Fisher's Landing and the casino we'd parked behind in Yuma. Its marina and beach on the Colorado River were available for day use by visitors for a fee, and free for hotel guests and also interlopers like us. We happened to be there on Easter weekend, and the place was crowded. This resort seemed to be a hit with fun-seekers of the family variety, a focus of activity for the community. We'd just spent several days in locations that felt remote and unpopulated, and it felt surreal– pleasantly so– to be at this neon-lit entertainment center. The three of us walked around inside the hotel/resort/casino complex and marveled at the elaborate indoor pool with multiple waterslides, the rows of whirring, dinging slot machines, and the movie theater's surprising array of offerings.
For dinner, we skipped the resort's eateries and ventured into town to find a restaurant. We ended up at Makena Grill, a delicious Hawaiian cafe that is, unfortunately, no longer in business today. My appetite had fully returned by now, and the new Mexican crown no longer felt like a rock inside my mouth. Later, as we sat on the banks behind BlueWater and watched the sunset, I learned that we were on a 16-mile stretch of the Colorado River called the Parker Strip. It's known for its atmosphere of relaxation and its numerous opportunities for river-related leisure pursuits. As with Squaw Lake, one would need a boat, or a friend with a boat, to get the largest possible quantity of fun out of this area. I indulged in another round of "What if I lived here?" and imagined being a booze-soaked, fishing-obsessed river rat. Maybe I could be someone who lived on a weathered old boat, someone who parked it every night outside the River's Edge Cantina, the bar that's right on the river behind the BlueWater Resort. Someone who hadn't left the river in years. What would that be like?
Early the next morning, I sat by the Colorado River again, and wrote in my journal for the first time in days. The water and the surrounding hills were lovely just after sunrise, all crisp shadows and pale earth tones. It almost felt like I was sitting next to the ocean in Santa Cruz, so familiar was the sensation of being next to a body of water with a notebook. I put a new ink cartridge into my pen and luxuriated in the thick, luscious lines I was making. As usual, the desert had introduced clarity. I untangled all kinds of knotty problems on those pages. I knew things I didn't know at other times. I accepted certain premises I might normally think of as impossible. This is the effect of being far from home, of having the chance to let the mind wander into its parallel lives.
In the RV we ate banana waffles and fried ham; it was Easter Sunday. The next day, we left Parker, stopping on the other side of the river to visit the weirdest thrift store I'd ever seen. Set in a dusty lot far from everything, it held rows and rows of shelves laden with dishes, many of them still containing remnants of food, as if they'd been brought directly from someone's dinner table to the sales floor. A back room full of books offered a selection of collage materials unrivaled by any in my previous experience: vintage textbooks, cookbooks, and magazines spanning four decades, a collection of paperbacks on occult topics, science fiction romances with lurid covers. It was hard to choose what to take with me. I wanted it all.
The rest of that day was spent driving across one of the most desolate desert landscapes I'd ever seen, on California State Route 62. Rather than photograph it, I stared out the window, lost in that gorgeous, barren world, thinking about the desert communities I'd encountered on this trip and how foreign they'd seemed to me. The thrift store near Parker had been the epitome of that strangeness. It had left me with the impression that there were many things about Parker I wasn't aware of, and never would be. I'd greatly enjoyed that feeling. I knew we would soon be on familiar ground again, and I wanted to savor this last stretch of unknown territory. I don't want to go home, I thought. A few hours and a thousand more unspoken thoughts later, we were pulling into Joshua Tree National Park.
SLEEPING AT THE SUPERMARKET
This time at Joshua Tree we were staying at Indian Cove Campground, which has a separate entrance from other parts of the park. None of us had ever camped in this part of Joshua Tree before. We all loved it immediately. Joshua Tree now felt like an extension of my inner concept of home, like something I owned. Realizing this, I felt that my transplant to California was now complete. It seemed like such a California thing to make regular trips to Joshua Tree.
The three of us walked the interpretive nature trail at Indian Cove and learned that this sheltered cove was an important place for Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, and Serrano tribes, especially during their seasonal migrations. The cove was something like a supermarket, where they could gather wild edibles, like seeds and nuts, as well as plants used for making bows and arrows, baskets, tools, and medicines. Archaeologists have found 121 plant species here that were used by native people. These resourceful people also hunted bighorn sheep, which still exist here, and smaller animals like rabbits, birds, and reptiles. We marveled at their survival skills and acknowledged the meagerness of our own as we prepared dinner in our comfortably equipped RV.
The next morning, we had plenty of time to linger. We were days ahead of our two-week deadline. I took a lot of pictures that morning with the Drainpipe, my 70-200mm Canon L lens. By now, I was slightly more resigned to the fact of returning to Santa Cruz. I began to look forward to seeing my pictures when I got home, and looked around for objects I hadn't shot on my previous visits to Joshua Tree. Photographing for a few hours usually improves my mood. It's a form of travel by itself, a movement through the doorway of the lens into other worlds. I'd be able to revisit those worlds when I downloaded the contents of my memory cards.
THE MAGNETIC PULL OF THE KNOWN
We left Joshua Tree and headed west. Soon everything we passed was familiar. We drove by abandoned buildings and ruined fences and all the usual Mojave Desert roadside views. We crossed Tehachapi, spent the night at Walmart again, ate Thai food in Paso Robles. It all flew by so fast, because I'd traveled this route on three different years and knew what was coming up next. In the back of the RV I was contemplating my dental adventure, tallying up what I'd gotten from it, besides a discount-priced crown.
This trip held the prize for the longest one we'd ever taken in the RV, and I could still feel the sensation of being in the Arizona desert, a full three days' drive from home. I'd fantasized many times on this trip about living a nomadic life with no schedule, exploring remote, unpeopled places. Disappearing into the desert sunlight, hiding within a mirage. It had almost felt like something that could actually happen, but the feeling was fading with every mile we traveled towards home.
Still, I could call it back with photos, and that was no small advantage. With a sudden rush of relief, I remembered that this time I was not coming back to a photography business with a summer of weddings ahead of me. I would have a lot more free time from now on. I had collected many things and would have the luxury of unpacking them slowly, examining them in the light. If I wanted to, I could let this voyage to the wide open, gloriously empty, often abandoned spaces set the tone for the rest of my year.
The closer we got to home, the more I thought about that special state of consciousness I always get into on the day I return from a trip, a sense of the known world being strange to me and different from how I left it. Every single time, I want that feeling to last, and every time I'm sad when it stops. Deep in my heart I made a wish to keep that feeling alive this time, at least a little bit, no matter how familiar everything became around me. And if I couldn't keep it alive, at least I could remember that I'd had it for a while, and find my way back to it somehow. As I thought these things, I took picture after picture, to cement them in my memory.
Reader Comments (1)
"...where I could unpack a lot of mental baggage and just leave it there, to be blown away by the desert winds, or maybe picked up and sold in some ghostly flea market, the otherworldly version of the yearly Quartzsite sales extravaganza."
Genius.
I want to live in your world,