The Long Drive Continues — Utah to the Sea

Around noon I began to wonder how crazy I was to plan the long drive I was taking. The second day of 500 plus miles. Mile after mile of standing on the pedal and holding the wheel. It was uncomfortable. I wasn’t bored, though, actually. I was enjoying the drive, the country unfolding before me. The barren desert of Utah and Arizona and Nevada. The even more barren desert of California. And finally, after Bakersfield, the green rumpled hills of the Coast Range. The coast range is home. It’s true, the place I grew up is 200 miles north. But geographically the two regions are extremely similar.

The Desert

I left St. George, Utah, at around 8:15 after having to go and get breakfast at a coffee bar. The breakfast I had scheduled at the AirBnB had not materialized. I was and am still irritated. “Come on, host,” I thought. “You sent me the offer of a breakfast for $16, I took you up on it, and then, at 7:00 a.m. when I showed up in the kitchen, as Carlos Santana said in his song You’ve Got to Change Your Evil Ways, “the house was dark and the pots were cold.”

I got behind the wheel and began to cross several hundred miles of dessert, I listened to John Mayer, and I thought about all the people in my life. I looked at the mountains that rose beside us and evaluated the prospective difficulty of climbing each one. This one was probably a walk-up, that one, you’d need ropes. I realized that I was thinking like a Coloradoan.

As I drove across the western states I looked at every farm beside the road and evaluated them for what kind of stock they had. What kind of fences they had?What kind of barn they had? How is the ground? How is the forage? Are they growing row crops? Every horse I saw I evaluated for breed, health, conformation, if they were close enough, and age.

Las Vegas Land of Almighty Glitz

In Las Vegas I marveled at the freeway view of the Strip. Buildings 50 stories tall rose up where tumbleweeds rolled not so long ago, and a Carvana tube with forty cars in its glass sheath stood on the right. Green lighted arrows pointed traffic one way, red X’s told it not to go another. An Italianate arch with a clock in it displayed the name “Bellagio” and I saw a Castle Casino and a parking garage ten stories tall and two sports stadiums and the South Point Casino which was entirely gold and had a jumbo tron in front with the announcement “Good Chinese Food.”

It was the tackiest thing I think I’d ever seen and I was horrified. As I hurried through, I was nearly sideswiped by a black Tesla.

California

I stopped in Barstow at the very worst Starbucks ever, I had to wait unbelievably long — ten minutes at least — for a 16 oz coffee with soy milk and sugar and the bathrooms were overcrowded too and there was plastic bags taped over the signs outside the bathroom so you couldn’t see what they were. Who was supposed to go in and who wasn’t, although generally, Starbucks bathrooms are for all-comers. I’m not sure why the signs were covered. Construction? State law compliance?

I got out of there and started across the Mojave desert. It went on for over an hour, two hours maybe. It didn’t really end until the town of Tehachapi, a mountain pass in California on the way to Bakersfield. The Mojave is full of tumbleweeds and sand. And a wind farm. When I reached Tehachapi the landscape changed, grass blanketed the hillside. I swooped down Highway 48 into Bakersfield and drove on toward the ocean.

Cholame

The intersection of Highway 46 and Cholame Road, where James Dean died in an accident with his Porsche Spyder in 1955, is a somber spot, one I have visited before. Why these things happen is an obvious reflective question, but the answer is obvious too: too much risk taking too much of the time. The accident occurred because, among other things, Dean assumed the other driver would see him, even though he was traveling well above the speed limit.

Expectations of others can get you in a lot of trouble, and so can assuming other people understand. This might be a good meditation for the day. If everyone takes care of themselves, things will go more smoothly. And don’t assume other people understand things you think are obvious. It might not be obvious to them.

That’s a big reflection for me.

The landscape had changed dramatically after I got west of I-5. The bare grassy hills of the Coast Range gave way to the Paso Robles wine country and finally to a tiny winding road, Old Creek Drive, that led a twisting, dipping and rising path for five miles, finally climbing up on a high hill and giving a view of the sea. The Pacific looked incredibly flat after staring at land undulating for two days straight. Light reflected on the water. It was five p.m, and since 8 in the morning I had driven close to 600 miles. The long drive was almost over, and I took pictures and then got back into the Lexus for the last five minutes to the AirBnB.

Morro Bay

I drove down the hill and easily found the house. The host said I could use the name “Barely” for him in this blog because he “barely” had had the opportunity to even become a person. “It’s a kind of family joke,” he told me. I was an accident,” he said. “Eleven years younger than my sister.”

Barely, an engineer and entrepreneur, 70 years old, white haired, and found sitting on the deck smoking and feeding peanuts to the scrub jays, could be best described as loquacious. He told me of his health, his work history, his money problems, his crazy ex-wife who has now moved to Australia, the love of his life who he met after he was divorced … and introduced me to Seth, a repairman, who has a big dog called Dio and is living here while he does some work on the house. Which is full of art and tile work and beautiful flowering plants.

My room is in a cabana off the garden porch, and now, in the dark, I can hear the roar of the waves on the beach a quarter mile or so away. It’s faint, but it’s there. I get ready to close out the day of the long drive, and I think about Barely telling me that he could sell me this house, this AirBnB, and that “Morro Bay is the best place in the entire state of California, it has everything … ”

I have arrived in the Land of Dreams.