Desert Southwest

I am wandering, adrift on the highways of southern Arizona and southeast California, aimlessly meandering about, not for lack of a compass but for lack of a destination. This particular region of the desert southwest, while lacking destinations for individuals without off-road vehicles, has an abundance of pit stops, towns populated by anonymous burger joints where mass-produced food is expeditiously stuffed into gullets, sterile fluorescence illuminating the cold disinfected tables that are as smooth as petrified ice cream. Families spill everywhere.

When you've seen one town in this region, you've seen them all: any region is a fractal representation of towns, but the Southwest has a fractal dimension of approximately one. Any given town has a size that is quantifiable by the ratio of number of people who reside permanently in the town to the number of people who enter the town intending to leave it immediately (pit stoppers). Granted, there is also the question of the town's industry - what are the underpinnings of the small town's economy? - but pit stoppage (tourism being too strong a term) is but one component. Almost universally, in this region the industry is agriculture. The food pantry of the country, if only by virtue of the fact that nowhere else can crops be grown so far into the winter.

Driving through the Southwest can be an odd experience. You drive through dull, desert landscapes, hour after monotonous hour, jumping from mountain range to lonely mountain range, from town to tiny farm town, an exhausted boredom the inevitable result. But these long periods of boredom are punctuated by the occasional blip on the “interesting events” radar - a truck hauling a helicopter shrink-wrapped in white plastic, a Border Patrol vehicle engaged in a car chase across the desert floor that kicks up a flurry of dust, a convoy of military vehicles stuffed with bored, eager soldiers charging forward along the tracts of interstate connecting military bases, tractors full of dusty white cotton being dumped into bales and sent off to gins, desolate sandy artillery ranges and abandoned bombing ranges, spiked, jagged peaks of sawtoothed mountains rolling past like slow motion waves with the silent, steady progression of your drive to your destination. You forget where you are going, but it doesn't matter; whether its a town of one hundred, one thousand, or one hundred thousand, they are all essentially the same lonely place, all equally cut off from civilization, all adrift on a sea of black, sun-baked sand and sharp, rocky waves.

A drive through southern Arizona and southeast California will teach you more than you ever wanted to know about the color brown: you will see thousands of variations on the color brown. The color brown is burned into your consciousness. Your every waking moment is spent looking at some shade of brown. To begin with, there is the brown that surrounds you on the ground. The light tan of sand, and the darker tan of dirt; the dark brown streaks of mud resulting from isolated rainstorms, seldom and sparse; the purple brown of mountains, which occurs in varying shades that result from the haze of nearly imperceptible white tan dust hanging in the air. Mountains close by occur in a rich shade of purple, etched with hundreds or thousands of black-brown shadows cast upon the mountain by the angle of the light on the mountain surface, like a 100-year-old cheek. Mountains further in the distance are a pale purple swirled with pale brown, the occasional reddish tint providing a splash of color in rocks with ferrous makeup. Further behind those mountains are still paler mountains, a light purple mixing with a barely detectible hint of pale brown-black where sorry half-shadows are cast by a ferocious sun.

Even the plants exhibit a palate of browns: creosote bushes are covered with a waxy oil that rims each leaf with a brown trim; dead grass waiting for flash floods to send the electric spark of life into their roots sit cowering with a pale yellow-brown color, spread everywhere. Trees overwhelmed by the sun in summer and underwhelmed by the sun in winter stand idly, their fractal arms and fingers reaching up to the sky, exhibiting traces of dark brown between chunks of black bark.

You're curious to stop in this town, or that town, but you don't. And you aren't missing anything - if you've seen one tiny farm town, you've basically seen them all. Sure, there are differences - this town's not big enough for a Home Depot, that town got picked for the coveted In-N-Out - but each one is filled with businesses of two types. There are the anonymous, corporate businesses, local manifestations of regional or national phenomenon. Or the local businesses, often labeled with a last name - McElhaney, Flake, Gutierrez, Cooley, Pearce, Hatch - belonging to the town baron, entrenched in local politics, their name on every plaque of donors of every public building, their dollars behind Catholic schools and crisp, clean new public libraries and shiny new fire stations. They are a network of people who run these towns. They earned their influence with hard work and honesty. But it is a hollow life they lead. They are royalty in castles made of sand - dark, crunchy, sun-roasted, indifferent dirt.

Highway 95 snakes north from Yuma, at the US-Mexico border, squeezed between the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge and the US Army's Yuma Proving Ground, as if trying desperately to keep the Proving Ground from encroaching on any more of the wildlife refuge. The Proving Ground already straddles Highway 95 and gobbles the southern chunk of the wildlife refuge, forming an L shape, looking on a map as though it is consuming the entrails of the wildlife refuge and working its way up.

The drive condenses much of life in the Southwest into a single drive. The road leading out of Yuma is surrounded, on both sides, with farmland - cauliflower and broccoli, mostly. Winter vegetables. The road curves, and runs parallel with railroad tracks, past cotton gins and dirt lots filled to capacity with the RVs of winter visitors. There's a turnoff, at one point, to the McPhaul Bridge, a dilapidated bridge, part of the former highway running between Yuma and Quartzite. It is eerily impressive, a dark brown miniature of the Golden Gate bridge, spanning an oversized ditch with a trickle of water running through it.

Continuing along the highway brings you to the entrance of the Yuma Proving Ground: proud artillery pieces crossed and aimed skyward, the way developers will put crossed palm trees at the entrance to a neighborhood so people driving by can comment on what a nice neighborhood it looks like. This blatant display of military might is rather Arizonan in its philosophy - this is the state, after all, where it is not uncommon to see firearms strapped to sides in the grocery store, or a sign in the window of the local bar reminding patrons that firearms are not allowed inside. The artillery is displayed proudly, entirely for show, a gross phallic display in the middle of the desert. The whole effect is rather weird.

Once you pass the proving ground, the next hour is routinely punctuated with sights of yellow gates marked "Government property: Authorized vehicles only;" warnings about live artillery rounds, land mines, and explosive ordinances (if you wander past these posted warnings, you may quickly find yourself in one of the proving ground's many artillery ranges); complexes of concrete bunkers and towers clustered alongside the highway; and the occasional convoy of tanks, half tracks, and armored vehicles cautiously crossing the highway like a train of baby ducks.

There are also brown road signs dispersed along the highway at periodic intervals, pointing the way to lakes and landmarks, destinations for off-road vehicle enthusiasts. This, too, embodies an important piece of everyday life in the Southwest: the off-road vehicle crowd. The highway is filled with RVs and large trailers pulled by lifted trucks with mud tires, driven by tattooed bros in their 20s or their tattooed girlfriends (the female bros are sometimes referred to as "bras"), soul patches and goatees, piercings, skateboard brand sunglasses, trucker hats, all gulping energy drinks when they're not knocking back cold brews, the bed of the truck loaded up with gas tanks, propane tanks, firewood, BBQ grills, hot dogs, carne. They fill Highway 95, they fill Interstate 8 between Yuma and San Diego, and they fill gas stations, all in a quest to fill their insatiable thirst for adrenaline and liquid hydrocarbons.

This is the purpose, ultimately, of the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge - not to serve as a refuge for wildlife, but to serve as a playground for these off-road junkies. Cibola National Wildlife Refuge? For the bros and bras. Martinez Lake? For the bros and bras. Senators Wash? For the bros and bras.

And in their eyes, you can see a kind of hunger, a hunger to tear up terrain and rip through sand and tear apart washes and throw dirt everywhere behind them. Like watching a child with a magnifying glass looking with hunger at an anthill. It's a very human destructive urge - a drive, a need, a compulsion to destroy - manifest in an array of off-road vehicles, ATVs, boats, all man-made, hydrocarbon-powered machinery. All a modern rendition of the Industrial Revolution dancing on Nature's grave.

Though the Desert Southwest may be seen as one single enormous hellhole, best traversed holding one's nose and driving as fast as the Arizona Highway Patrol will allow, it is well-known to its residents that even within a desert, there are regions of plenty and regions of... not-so-plenty. Take the Saguaro cacti - God's version of a dick joke. If you find yourself in a desert in the southern-central or southeast part of Arizona, you will be surrounded by plentiful gargantuan phallic monuments, like alien retirees, standing around in mountainsides basking in the Arizona sunshine, stretching out their arms like they're in retiree pilates, congregating in clusters in the shady spots inside the walls of canyons to hang out slothfully all day in the shady heat. All of the open deserts in the region are plentifully filled with Saguaro cacti, are teeming with wildlife, both permanent and migratory, thirst being relieved by a season of rainstorms, albeit brief. These regions contrast wildly to bone-dry western Arizona, or the desert oases that cropped up along the fertile Colorado River, which enabled large ecosystems to develop, and humans to establish agriculture, a feature that's been central to the contest for water in the Desert Southwest.

Every road that cuts through this area has its own feel, its own characteristics. Interstate 8 passes through the lonely, desolate stretches of a desert void of green. It is long and straight and travels through the desert like a thousand-yard stare. What little green does exist along this interstate is scrubby and low, creeping and clustering on the ground. "Greenery" around Interstate 8 is as brown as it is green. The plants blend naturally into the desert landscape, like shadows.

Interstate 10, passing through Arizona further to the north than Interstate 8 (interstate travel trivia: even-numbered interstates pass west-to-east, with odd-numbered interstates proceeding south-to-north; enumeration of west-to-east interstates proceeds south-to-north, with enumeration of south-to-north interstates proceeding west-to-east), snakes through Phoenix to the east and links up with Los Angeles; Interstate 8 similarly links the California city of San Diego, on the California-Mexico border, with Yuma, on the Arizona-Mexico border, and eventually Tucson). The 10 passes through comparably barren and depressing land, scattered with occasional mountains that occur with the frequency of dog droppings in a neighborhood with careless neighbors.

"The Colorado Desert. Where God took his dog for a morning constitutional."

[...] 95 o course,j ll earl, tracves its humbe way up the mojave/kofa basin something, watershed? river, lakes and where there are lakes there are people, and where there are people there are vehicles, and where there are vehicles there is infrastructure and noise and gas stations and RV hookups and dumping stations and and and

Its like they're a zombie army, following orders from the ghost Edward Abbey: " In the first place you can't see *anything* from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the...cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe." And there they are, feeling every bump and every hill of the desert, tearing through it, tasting and breathing the thick, hazy dust, eating it in their barbecued dinners at night, mouthfuls of sand, the earth itself invading every sense.

Running south, west of Highway 95, west of the Army's Yuma Proving Ground, west of the Arizona-California border, Highway 111 traces the San Andreas fault east, passing through a manmade freak-show of Nature playing itself out in a perpetual toxic apocalypse, occurring within and beside a filthy watering hole in the California desert.

What, didn't you know about the Salton Sea?

John Waters, in his documentary "Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea," presents an arresting picture of the Salton Sea as a man-made blunder that some are scrambling to save, and others sitting and watching. The documentary explains the original purpose of the Salton Sea, and the dreams, sometimes mad, that water can inspire in the desert. An entire resort community was planned along the shores, roads for housing developments paved, land bought up and marked up for sale to land prospectors or retired suckers.

Fast forward ____ (explain what happened):

[photo] decay.

[photo] desolation.

[photo] ruin.

[photo] death.

The Salton Sea smells salty and sharp, like the recently-dead, newly-rotting corpse of a dehydrated sea. It is a weird place; the seashore is covered in the bones of dozens of generations of dead fish. Wiped out each year, when temperatures and salinity in the sea drive oxygen out of the water and literally suffocate tens of thousands of these fish to death, their bones are an eerie, ever-present reminder of their Biblical annihilation.

The actual liquid of the sea is far better than anything I can imagine serving as the liquid broth in the cauldron of the three witches of Macbeth. It is an incredibly salty brew, olive green and covered in a natural biofilm with the consistency of mucus, forming bubbles uncannily akin to snot bubbles, chained to meter-long strands of Salton Sea mucus, and it would be the perfect broth for such a cauldron. The salinity of the Salton Sea is the product of a number of rivers of the Southwest emptying into the Salton Sea (Laguna Wash, Palm Canyon, various other desert springs), plus runoff from nearby farms, which contains a large amount of salt, and rivers of a more malign nature -- rivers like the New River, a stream of raw sewage and industrial discharge running north from the California-Mexico border, collecting agricultural runoff, and gushing down into the below-sea-level basin, in the midst of which the Salton Sea sits, catching runoff. The dream of the Salton Sea, the luxury getaway, full of exotic beach resorts, the Southwest response to Florida, a little piece of paradise within reach of Los Angeles, in the midst of sunny Southeastern California, has disappeared down the drain; the Salton Sea has become a giant, man-made toilet for the Desert Southwest.

There are some places of incredible beauty in California, where you want to stop your car, get out, look around, take a deep whiff of that piece of California. If you do this along the beaches of the Salton Sea, you'll wonder for hours afterwards whether it is possible to catch cancer from the air, because your head aches, and your mucous membranes don't seem to be working, and now your hair is falling out... Rather, when driving through Highway 111, you desperately hope that Highway Patrolmen look the other way while you rip through the most macabre strip of land in our country.

[ caption of sick face: should've listened to the yelp review. "Do not take deep breaths. Do not hold your breath any longer than 5 seconds Do not engage in strenuous activities." ]

So much for a day at the beach. But then again, maybe the need for a day at the beach is a central thread running through this whole region. Long and extensive loops along the highways of southern Arizona and southeast California reveal a dry, parched land, filled with environmental monuments that simultaneously astound (such as the environmental muck stewing in the Salton Sea) and amaze (such as the wide variety of ecosystems that develop along the course of a single river - the Colorado River). Rural farms, hicks packed into tiny diners that smell of stale smoke and pancakes, truck stops with truck stop food and truck stop entertainment, shanties, shacks hobbled together, satellite disk out back (if you trust the Heritage Foundation, 2/3 of people living below the poverty line have cable or satellite television), dogs in the yard, trucks out front with dirt around the tires, straggling farming communities forking food into America's gullet each winter. Each of them barely surviving on dregs of water from what remains of the mighty Colorado once it's reached Mexico and run through tens of thousands of grubby fingers all the way down.

Starting out in the farm towns as you proceed southeast from Los Angeles, you run into clusters of streetlights, dim excuses for towns, which band together geographically into a single series of stoplights but insist on boundaries being drawn out among pieces of cities - Brawley, Imperial, El Centro, Holtville, Heber - one may can pass through three dozen cities while in search of the right place to stop and relieve a shrinking bladder. Cross over into Arizona, and no one plays wise. Dis city is on dis side a da river, dat city is on dat side a da river. Most towns in southwest Arizona are named after the biggest and nearest mountain, rock feature, saddle point, or navigation point, and in some cases are named after a local, nearly-exterminated Native American indian tribe.

What kind of weirdo ends up out in the middle of god-forsaken desert in an RV, clustering together and commiserating with others of their kind like some kind of alien ritual? Geologists, for one. Geologists do not lack for synonyms with which to describe the topography: basins, valleys, bowls, troughs, channels, canals, canyons, rims, passes, saddles, cruxes; peaks, mountains, hills, vistas, ridges, domes, crests, breaks. Farmers, too, who have their own litany of synonyms to describe the many forms of the desert eskimo's equivalent to snow: dirt. The endless varieties of brown with purple, tired but still beautiful, always make an attempt to please, like a professional chef condemned to cook nothing but plain spaghetti for the rest of his life.

It takes a special kind of nut to live in the desert, is what I'm saying; a withered, weathered, dehydrated, lacking-in-sound-judgement nut.

But then, it starts to soak in. You find yourself lapsing into a fantasy... it would be nice to go camping for a bit. Oh, and an RV does sound exciting. And you've got everything you need nearby -- No! Stop that. You are not going to do that. You are not going to sell your possessions. You are not going to end up in Blythe, California, living in a van down by the river.

It can, potentially, be a complex logistical symphony: actually, physically moving for a season each year from an exotic locale like Wisconsin to the deserts of Arizona. Imagine you get your RV all the way out there, settle down for day one, and then open the fridge, only to realize: no produce. Oops. And try not to get swindled by the plentiful pop-up RV dealers if something goes wrong with your RV. Yikes - you weren't actually planning on camping there, in the middle of that wash, were you? Those six-foot-high sides, the ones formed by rainwater eroding away a path during the summer rainy seasons - every single time it rains here. Your neighbors will wake up the morning after a good rain, and you will be gone.

Only a special kind of mentality thrives here. You have to be grizzled, have that look like the sun has baked any semblance of frontal cortex activity out of your brain, you're running on instinct and conditioning. You have to be stand-offish -- you know, sitting on your porch with a shotgun to protect your land and all that. And you have to be friendly -- small towns, after all, are built on a currency of trust -- but guarded, i.e., not too gullible. And when you get entire communities like that together, you wind up with places like Quartzite. Bombay Beach. Mecca.

(I drove through Mecca, California, population 8500. I had to stop for gas and coffee, and so I got out at the only gig going in that town. Breaking into a grin halfway through my own joke, I told the guy, "Hey, you probably heard this one before, but the next time you tell people you're from Mecca, try telling them like this: '[quick]I'm from Mecca - [protracted, coy]no, before you ask, no, not *that* Mecca.'" The guy stared at me for a few seconds. Then he goes, "That'll be 2.50.")

Before I embarked on this trip, I read Colson Whitehead's fantastic, articulate zombie apocalypse novel, Zone One, from which I had heard him read an excerpt on an episode of the podcast [To the Best of Our Knowledge]. After diving into that orgy of language of beautiful and frightening zombie imagery the way a ravenous wolf tears into a fresh kill, I was spattered with gory thoughts about zombies. I found the "future seaside resorts" of the Salton Sea to be the perfect setting for a Salvador Dali film, and zombies would not be far out of place there (frankly, if everyone living beside the Salton Sea became zombies, not much would change about their lifestyle; they would probably end up getting more exercise, because they'd have to walk further in search of food, and residents are so few and far between, and they'd finally get to a town, and there'd be no one to eat, and they'd be like, "Shit!!! I need some flesh! The nearest living people are 50 miles down the road and it's just a dairy queen and a gas station! I wish I could eat people food again, and drive." Or, they'd just be shot by all the non-zombie gun-owners living out their dream fantasies of actually getting to shoot every trespasser on their land.

These places are extremely resilient, and very slow to change. That can be a double-edged sword: in a disaster-ravaged world, many support structures would disappear -- but out here, many of those support structures are resented in the first place. What makes these places so backwards, so slow to catch up with modernity socially and technologically, ends up being somewhat of an advantage. It acts as a high-pass filter, removing high-frequency noise and rapid changes, exhibiting only slower and more gradual changes.

These fellow human beings down there, they are a bit like the cockroaches of civilization, scurrying around the floor of a basin that drains into a giant, swampy toilet, complete with mucus-covered fart bubbles gathering in snot strands on the fish-skeleton-covered shores. Come nuclear Armageddon, breakdown of civilization, end of life as we know it - these grizzled old desert rats would still be out here on their inflatable rafts, playing old records, cooling themselves off with a solar-powered hand-held fan whilst reading Harry Potter novels, laying around basking in the California sunshine, stretching out their arms and congregating in clusters in shady spots along the shores of this land-locked man-made soup of salt and fish and birds to hang out slothfully all day in the shady heat.