I've Got the Sweetest Hangover

It was so nice to wake up in the Fifi.  I had roused sometime during the night and been reassured by seeing the three glowing turquoise heads hovering above me, but when the coral colored morning light started to stream in the eastern windows, it made the whole trailer shimmer with lavender and pink.  I'd slept on feather pillows under a silk comforter in a bower of golden glitter.  If I knew how to purr, I would have been making a sound like a thresher.

I spent a leisurely morning tucked cozily in my trailer writing and preparing myself for departure.  It was stone silent except for the sound of the wind, which had picked up considerably overnight.  I was so happy in my littler trailer!

I reluctantly packed the last items in the car and headed out just before lunch time.  Next stop, Lake Havasu City, where I'll attend a Western Pyrotechnics conference.  It was a relatively short drive compared to the journeys I'd made the four previous days which allowed me to slow down and enjoy the scenery, especially since there were all sorts of charming clouds lurking about, throwing dramatic shadows over the landscape.

I stopped several times to investigate something or other I found interesting, and one time when I was poking around the roadside desert, I spied this lovely item:

Looks like a piece of paper in the sand to you, doesn't it?  But the trained eye (thank you Nate) knows this space age portico to be the doorway to a pack rat palace!  The cup became submerged in the sand, so this sophisticated rodent added a Jetson's style cover to mark the entrance of the abode.  Frank Gehry of field mice, this one.

Just before reaching the tiny town of Rice, California, I happened upon a shoe fence that I remembered having seen on a previous trip.  I was very happy to see it had grown significantly since my last visit.  There definitely seems to be some sort of  passion at work helping the thing to thrive!

There were quite a few decorated shoes, but there was also a huge diversity of other items that people felt compelled to leave - a washrag with a Sharpie message, for example.  I became sort of attached to the monument below.  It stood a little apart from the fence and seemed to be dedicated to a particular individual, one Omar Toache.  It felt very much like one of the wonderful statues in the Desert Art Museum of Noah Purifoy.  I like to think he might have even inspired it.

I was through the beautiful rocky hills of the Parker area in no time, crossing the dam so I could finish making my way to Lake Havasu City.  I feel like tomorrow is the first day of school and I can hardly wait!

Valentines Salvation on the Way to Hicksville

What an incredible day!  I took it on today to celebrate being my own valentine since I'd be out on the road by myself, and what an amazing result.

After breakfasting and provisioning in Yuma, I set out on a path that would take me north past the decrepit Salton Sea area on my way to my ultimate destination: Hicksville Trailer Palace in the Twentynine Palms area.  That would allow me to drop by and visit Salvation Mountain outside of Niland, California and it was urgent that I do so because the fellow that built it, Leonard Knight, was recently moved to a managed care facility, which is unfortunately an all too common death knell for a folk art environment.

Leonard has spent the last 30 years literally painting a big pile of mud.  He's added elaborate chambers and rooms to the mountain using trees, straw and other salvaged materials like windshields.  But every square inch of it is coated in bright shades of what was left over from painting your daughter's bedroom.  Leonard's legion of fans lug their leftovers to him so he can continue his work, tirelessly.  Just look at the donations that had accumulated when I was there:

The sheer scale of the place is hard to capture.  If you look at the picture of the mountain above, you can just see a tiny couple sitting at the top under the cross.  Suddenly, that becomes a lot of paint and a lot of painting when you think about it.

But what I see most when I look at this place is the thousands and thousands of beautiful abstracts that lurk in every single nook and cranny.

What a perfect place to take me, Valentine!  Salvation Mountain is about love in a way few other things manage to be.

After I left, I stopped and spent a good hour picking through a trash dump not a mile west of Salvation Mountain.  The glittering bits of glass had caught my eye as I had driven by earlier, so I took a sack and spent some time filling it with little bits of treasure for my own version of Salvation Mountain.  What a swell day, Valentine!

I drove north past the odd, sad, Salton Sea including a town which is straightforwardly named Mortmar (dead sea so far as I can tell).  The Salton Sea is a man made body of water that has a long sad history of environmental disaster.  There are still people living in little outposts here and there, but it's largely abandoned as a place to live.

I did stop at a date farm along the way to sample some dates and try one of their famous date shakes.  My review: tasted just like a milkshake.  Meh.

I continued driving north to a favorite passage of I-10 where it intersects with Highway 62 - dramatic desert scenery with a forest of immense wind turbines, turning as fast as their arms will go.  It's the turn off to a wonderful stretch of this great country of ours, The Twentynine Palms highway.  There are so many choice destinations along this road from the Integratron toNoah Purifoy's Desert Art Museum (to name just two), but I was headed to the Hicksville Trailer Palace for a Valentine's day celebration in the gloriously purple Fifi trailer.  B'anna Federico had kindly tipped me off to this place several months ago and it was just in time to include it as a stop on my itinerary.  I had a big Valentine's evening planned: a giant box of chocolates, a bottle of good champagne and some tasty morsels to eat.

When I arrived, everything began tumbling into place at light speed.  The trailer was perfect.  The setting was perfect.  The other GUESTS were perfect!  I spent the rest of the evening playing in my trailer and getting to know my fellow trailer trash - I had an absolute ball!   What a great group of folks.  Obi and Ali brought their archery gear, so we spent some time getting to know one another while plunking arrows into the targets on the BB gun/Archery range.  Bernadette and Dave regaled us with stories of Disneyland and ordered us a delicious pizza. Todd, Ethan and Jesika worked in the recording studio and joined us between bouts of recording for delicious bourbon and lively conversation.  There was a fire under the stars.  AND a fire in a tepee!  I think I could write a book about how much fun I had last night.  One of the last things I remember was sitting outside gazing up at an incredible canopy of stars and planets, the desert whisper quiet with a steady breeze blowing, all while the strains of Mr. Blue Sky by E.L.O. played from the jukebox in this terrain so frequently visited by extraterrestrials.  Perfect.

I came to Hicksville for a cool hotel room and I got a whole event is all I know to say.  Awesome.

Aerospace and hot dogs

Detail of "The Wrath" by Tristan Eaton

I had chosen to stay in Tucson overnight so I could get up the next morning and catch the early tour of  a place called the Boneyard.  The Boneyard is part of the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and is the largest aircraft storage and preservation facility in the entire world.   The nearby Pima Air and Space Museum (which is also one of the largest of its kind in the world) offers guided bus tours down the rows and rows and rows of airplane mummies (they're coated in a plastic-like shroud) that dot literally miles of  Arizona desert.

I had driven by the Boneyard years ago and been mesmerized by the sight of so many distant planes, all parked in neat little squadrons of like individuals.  Interestingly (to me anyway) after spending a little over an hour touring the facility up close, I can honestly say that the idea is more romantic from afar.  The plastic wrap made the planes seem abstract and toy-like, like a movie set of an old western town where none of the buildings have backs.. Even in the abstract, though, it was mighty impressive to see all those tax dollars at work.  Man we've sure made a lot of stuff to threaten people over the years.

Below is what passes for a sense of humor in the Army - a stop along celebrity row where dozens of notorious planes are parked yields this sight in the space placarded for the Stealth Bomber.  It's invisible, get it?  

After my tour concluded, I spent some time strolling through the museum where I discovered several marvelous surprises.  First and foremost, there was a brilliant art exhibit on display, modestly inserted between plane fuselages and bomb casings. Eric Firestone (scion of tire moguls, I'm sure) has gathered a large group of graffiti artists and arranged for them to paint various parts from the Boneyard.  Several artists even completed entire airplanes! Rather than me spending a bunch of time trying to describe it, here's a link if you're interested in more information and pictures of this exciting project:

          http://www.ericfirestonegallery.com/?page_id=1177 

I found the pieces to be sophisticated, witty, daring and beautiful.  I've included a few of my favorites below:

"Enos" by Randy Slack

"The Wrath" by Tristan Eaton

Finial detail from "Cherubs of Justice" by Hector Ruiz

 Can't have a graffiti show without Shephard Fairey.  This piece is entitled OBEY Megaphone.

This is the inside of the megaphone.  Beautiful and amazing.

There were many other cool surprises at the museum.  I particularly loved the sea planes (there was one that was as large as 4 city buses stacked one on top of each other!), but the one that pretty much stopped me dead in my tracks was the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.  I try and keep up on cool things and somehow I had remained completely ignorant on the topic of this amazing piece of aerospace.  It was designed for the CIA to replace the U-2 spy plane and to stand near it feels like being on a movie set.  It is immense and mysterious and blackly ominous.

I was planed out and starving by the time I left the Pima, so I headed to the 'hood to indulge in a regional specialty know as Sonoran hot dogs.  I had done some research and signs pointed to a tiny food truck known as Ruiz Hot Dogs as being one of the best purveyors in town.

  

The basic make-up of a Sonoran hot dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog shoved into a soft Mexican roll topped with pinto beans, chopped tomatoes, onions, jalapeno sauce, cheese, mayonnaise, ketchup and mustard.  The authentic ones come with a roasted chili on the side.

I ordered two dogs in my best Spanglish, and was soon wolfing down the contents of my little paper boats with abandon.   Homemade horchata topped off the meal and the entire repast set me back a mere $5.50.

I headed off to Yuma with a belly full of real food and a rose put in my check from eating al fresco.

Love and Missiles and Death

When I stuck my head out the door early Sunday morning, the biting wind had been replaced with a mantle of dull gray clouds and had deposited a sprinkling of ice on the horizontal surfaces of my car.  As I headed off toward El Paso, tiny pellets of rain mixed with ice began to pepper the car.  Before long  I passed a convoy of TXDOT trucks, one spraying the interstate with deicer, the other three trucks spreading sand.  I'd been monitoring the weather, but all this ice stuff took me completely by surprise!  Still, the driving conditions seemed to be perfectly fine - it was only the elaborate reaction that was making me nervous.

By the time I reached El Paso, the cloud deck had broken and the winter sun shone brightly.  I navigated my way to a working class neighborhood northeast of the city in search of a house called La Casa de Asucar. 

La Casa de Asucar is bounded on one side by the feeder road of a major freeway (54) , and on another the southern fence of Fort Bliss which is the Army's 2nd largest installation in the U.S.  As such, the Casa could not be more anathema to it's surroundings, much like a beautifully decorated cupcake on the dashboard of an Abrams tank sitting in the desert.

Casa de Asucar was sculpted by a gentleman by the name of Rufino Loya who spent over 30 years creating his amazing tribute to the city of El Paso.  The house does indeed look like icing, especially if you're a fan of Latin American Day of the Dead decorations.  It wouldn't have surprised me one bit if I'd looked in the window to find a sugar skeleton busy ironing clothes, her hair in curlers. 

The house is a real gem.  It's packed with posies, pineapples (as a sign of welcome) and putti, many of the angels sporting startlingly expressive eyes.  One of the things I most admire about Rufino's design work is his use of repeating patterns.  His designs are precise, geometric, elaborate and repeating.  It's a really pleasing place, brimming with love.  The perfect counterpart for the other destination I had planned for the day - White Sands Missile Park.

I had done some research earlier in the morning and was excited to discover that if you head north on the highway that runs right beside La Casa de Asucar, it quickly begins to dwindle in size and about 30 miles later, dead ends into the El Paso gate of the White Sands Missle Range.  I had been keen on visiting the base's Missile Park to look at some real projectiles and do some research on designs I might use for my spaceship.

The road quickly transformed from a roaring urban highway into a aging two lane blacktop snaking through the desert.  Because the road dead ended at the base, there were very few fellow traveller which lent even more of an apocolyptic edge to the already prickly scenery.  I giggled out loud the first time I saw a Tank X-ing sign, and stopped for a quick picture when I spotted the second, despite all the dire warnings posted along the route about the distinct possibility of an encounter with unexploded ordinance if one were to be lax and wander off the road.  I quite enjoyed the driving, sleuthing for signs of military activity.  The road I was driving along was named War Road, after all.

After clearing the post I drove slowly through the streets of the base admiring the beauty of the location, tucked as it is into a desert valley bounded by mountains on one side.  I really liked the way the Park looked as I approached it - dozens of immense pointy warheads aimed in every conceivable direction of the compass, surreal in profile against the dramatic steel gray storm clouds that had moved in.

                                  

I found myself to be pretty fascinated as I wandered around, admiring these pretty instruments of destruction.  Technological relics from the Cold War era that were used for test measurement such as the above Contraves Cinetheodolite Electro Optial Tracking System and the below Intercept Ground Optical Recorder (IGOR) were the items that captivated my imagination most, although there is a weird sort of cheap thrill in seeing a missile bigger than your damn house.

                                                 

I spent most of the visit simply absorbing the shapes and designs of these empyreal travellers.  Imbibed the pointy points, inhaled the decisive fins, allowing the physics of the things to crystalize into an aesthetic that would permeate my brain.  Got it.

I headed back toward Las Cruces after leaving White Sands Missle Range.  There I'd rejoin the interstate and hightail it on over to Tucson to spend the night.  Before I reached I-10, I saw a bridge ahead and looked so see what river I'd be crossing - the Rio Grande!  One of my favorites!  If you doubt the severity of the drought in the southwest, take a look at this my friends - the mighty Rio Grande in Las Cruces:

Yikes.

I stopped at an I-10 rest area just before sunset to watch the dramatic clouds and give some space to my thoughts.  It had been a thought provoking day after all, love and missiles and death.  I had received news early in the morning that a cherished friend had died overnight, succumbing to cancer that had taken root in his spine and brain and lungs.  A boy that had been a bit of a surrogate son for a time in my life, doe-eyed Michael Charnock with a heart of gold. Cancer had taken him, just like his mother, way before any of us were ready.  Damn it.

       

But that's exactly why I'm out here doing it - the icing, the bombs and the clouds - and loving every single minute of it.

Headed 'em up and moved 'em out

Harper Community Park, Harper, Texas

Yahooo!  I'm heading west again, my first road trip in a year.   And I've missed it sorely.  I'm headed to Lake Havasu City for the annual Western Pyrotechnics conference I so enjoy, and will then make several other pleasant stops as I meander further west to San Francisco and then home via Big Sur.

Driving across I-10 through west Texas, especially when you've done it a number of times, is an affair mostly to be endured with only a few notable places to break the journey.  I decided to pause in Ozona (so named for its plentiful good air) to see what I might find since my previous relationship with the town centered entirely around gasoline.  On the northern most edge of town I spotted an intriguing little stone house with all sorts of fancy and imaginative brick and rock work.  I especially liked this trio of arches with their rakish caps.

I circled back and parked on the town square so I could check out a few of the old buildings I had seen earlier.  When I popped my head into the laundromat as I passed by, I was reminded immediately that I was deep in the heart of the oil patch of Texas - "No rig clothes" read the large red letters above the washing machines.  Imagine pulling your chiffon ballroom gown from the washer and finding a crude oil ring around the collar!  Honestly.

On another corner of the square sat an intriguing looking boarded up building evidently constructed in the early 10s or 20s.  I finally located a small weathered sign out front that read "Hotel Ozona".  A smaller sign had been added later - I'd guess the 50s - that read "TV - refrigerated air".  You definitely want and need refrigerated air in the west Texas desert.  A good bit of the commerce in Ozona once centered around the discovery of rich oilfields in the area, and the hotel was likely used by company men sent to check up on rigs and such.  The photo above is the back of the hotel, a wild tangle of parched branches and rusty fire escapes.

I circled, but couldn't find a way to penetrate the exterior - the real estate company that owned the building had secured it soundly, though I had trouble imagining it would have gotten much traffic if it had been left completely open.  Not to worry, though.  I had just watched a Gothic horror movie about a creepy old house the previous evening and wouldn't have dared go in by myself, even if a red carpet had been rolled out for me.

The taggers had left an either tragically hip or hopelessly clueless piece of advice for me: "Fuk haters",  wisdom worthy of a pillar along the path to West Texas enlightenment.

I drove a short while longer and pulled in to bed down in Fort Stockton. A bone chilling wind blew through me as I ran back and forth from the car to the room unloading my personal effects.  The first day of driving always merits a bit more tidying than usual to set things right.  Tomorrow the rhythm will begin in earnest.  In the meantime, I'll lay in bed and happily listen to the cold wind whistling outside my window.