Motel Sunsets, Installment 2                                  Jason Baldinger

 

 

Day 11: I was just outside of Barstow when…

 

Bullhead City, Arizona to Los Angeles (almost 350 miles)

 

        California appears, not unlike the Colorado River, no pomp, no Grapes of Wrath-esque scenes.  Maybe Steinbeck was somewhere smoking a cigarette I didn’t see him, instead I find curmudgeonly trolls under a bridge laughing at anyone looking for an America that has all but disappeared.  Still, I wonder from the future what Dustbowl expatriated Okies were thinking when they crossed into the Mojave looking for the Garden of Eden and found nothing more than dust, nothing more than sand.

 

        Welcome to the Mojave Desert, cruel, unforgiving, windswept sand dunes, blazing sun and I forgot to get gas.  There hasn’t been a sign of life for thirty miles and I’m beginning to worry.  Towns turned ghost, turned to dust, blow by and I see myself wandering along roadside sand, crossing bleached washes and arroyos carrying little water bottles in a man purse while looking for an oasis with full service.  To my relief, I stumble on a café with five dollars a gallon gas, well worth the exorbitant price considering it saves me from extracurricular warm weather hiking. 

 

Early afternoon miles, California, the High Desert burning away, creating phantom turns. I float along staring at apparition eighteen wheelers, and specter freight trains.  Occasional dips in the road break monotony. It’s easy to believe that there hasn’t been a person who inhaled the air here in years, and that civilization was taken down by bugs about the time the Manson family raided the Hollywood Hills.  The only evidence of human existence is arranged in rocks spelling warnings and prayers around Chambless. The only other proof of existence is carrion picking bleach bones in the midday sun.

 

  San Bernardino, the Garden of Okie Eden blooms.  Dropping into the valley as nine thousand foot peaks tower above, I find it briefly hard to believe that one of the largest cities in the United States is less than 100 miles away and then the suburbs kick in.  I am determined to finish driving the Mother Road, so I follow through this endless sea of sprawl, through towns I don’t care to remember.

 

I ended up hours later in Glendora, hiding in palm trees, waiting for Santa Monica to appear.

 

Tomorrow: The Raymond Chandler Dust Up.

 

 

Day 12: “Ocean In View. O! The Joy!”

 

Los Angeles to Santa Maria, California (160 miles)

 

        There is no easy way to deal with the immensity of the Los Angeles.  Maps, intuition, magic powders, mantras, potions, all fail.  The only thing that may work is teleportation.  Traffic runs at wildly varying speeds, rearranging already distorted molecules and somehow I end up at Griffith Park Observatory.  Griffith Park, Sal Mineo reaches his untimely end on a mountain that seems to stand taller in the illusion of a flat sea.  Griffith Park, a blooming flower oasis offering panoramic views of the big huge of L.A, of the sign that has become synonymous with fame. There is nothing like seeing the size of your opponent to make you abandon the fight.

 

        Down from the hill, light speed wanderings of West Hollywood.  It doesn’t take long for me to realize the tourist side of L.A. is not for me.  I find in the brief period of time here that I prefer the tawdry run down parts of the city, the apparitions from Raymond Chandler’s era, but most of those visions are gone. They have been replaced by miles of strip malls, and a veritable Noah’s Ark of every kind of business.

 

        I struggle down Santa Monica Boulevard not realizing that movement ceased to exist.  The world moves and repositions but traffic in Los Angeles however, does not.

 

        3:30 pm, to quote William Clark, “Ocean in View. O! The Joy!”  It’s has taken twelve days, to do something that two hundred years ago took The Corps of Discovery over a year and a half.  I took a different route, although I left from the same places (Pittsburgh and St. Louis) and I will cross their path again later in this trip.

 

        The Santa Monica Pier, terminus of Route 66, the Mother Road has led me from St. Louis to here.  I stare at the ocean the same way I did fifteen years ago in Maine, five years ago in Providence and two years ago in Biloxi.  There is no way when you see the ocean not to be bowled over by it as space, as infinity. 

        Standing at the end of the pier watching the waves, feeling the motion of the earth, the spray of the water, I memorize white caps as they roll, break, bubble, and foam.  The water vining in myriad patterns, the air, the mussels and barnacles attached to the wood, the kiting sea gull in the stiff wind of this chilly very un-California day.  As I scan the scene, taking in every tiny atom, I see a teenage girl drop her bikini bottom and piss in the ocean.

 

        Welcome to Santa Monica.

 

        The next stage of this rushing trip follows Route 1 and 101 from Santa Monica onto Seattle, and I engaged that task forthwith. 

 

Malibu advertises having 27 miles of scenic coast, unfortunately that coast is hidden behind houses and other buildings.  The scenery doesn’t begin to open until Zuma Beach, and even then only intermittently.  I have followed this route now for 140 miles, flirting here and there with the ocean.  There is a bluster of cold May wind outside, I’m in Santa Maria at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains, twenty miles inland, in a dirty motel with a Dos Equis in my hand.

 

Tomorrow: Henry Miller waits for his mail and considers tending rose bushes.

 

 

Day 13: Rocinante or the California Saga

 

Santa Maria to Santa Cruz, California (200 miles)

 

Part 1: Reroute to Salinas

 

“A journey is like a marriage.  The most certain way to be wrong is to think you’re in control of it.”

 

        Steinbeck has been nipping at my heels since I crossed the Colorado River.  This morning on the way to Big Sur, I’m crushed to find Route 1 is closed, due to a rock slide.  To go onto Big Sur, I have to go ninety miles to Salinas, and then come south almost fifty miles which presents a dilemma of time and more mileage than I really want to engage in.  Grudgingly, I accept fate and get on Forty-six East crossing into the California Grasslands that turn slowly into vineyards then continue to morph into vast farms that dominate the central parts of the state.   These lettuce, artichokes, strawberry, and melons fields have been worked by Chinese, Japanese, American, and Mexicans migrants for well over a century.  As the highway rolls across the fields, I pass trucks loaded with produce, buses loaded with workers, portable toilet trailers in tow.  

 

I take a break in Salinas, birthplace of John Steinbeck, current home of the National Steinbeck Center.  As museums go the Steinbeck Center lends a solid picture of the America that led Steinbeck to write great books such as The Grapes of Wrath and also of the man himself.  As soon as I ran into the quote above, I remember that I should always expect to be helpless in the hands of fate.

       

Part 2: Onto Monterey

 

“Having too many THINGS they spend their hours and money on the couch searching for a soul.”

 

After Steinbeck or with Steinbeck, I head southwest to Monterey, sticking with the fate to check out Cannery Row.  I have been in two California State Parks in the past couple days and both were more like amusement parks.  Fisherman’s Wharf and Cannery Row in Monterey are now part of a state park by the same name.   The wharf is a series of seafood restaurants that looks more like a circus.  Cannery Row, which has flags up to point out that Ed Rickets lived here, is mostly newer hotel buildings built in place of the old sardine canning factories.  I wonder what Steinbeck would have thought of this homogenization of places he immortalized.  Perhaps he might have said something like this, (although I’m sure he would have been more eloquent):“It’s just another example of a smaller and smaller world meant to look bigger than it is.   We move closer towards a world with warning labels to accompany everything, we use cute phrases to get around the reality of words.  This world where there is only halcyon states created by prescription drugs and where we all act as empty self-serving organisms left alone to suffer in quiet resignation.”

       

Part 3: Sunset in Santa Cruz

 

“Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.”

 

        Santa Cruz pizza parlors, couple beer dinner, then a stroll down to the pier along the beach.  Couples pass, dudes dressed up like 80’s gang members riding bikes with bull dogs running behind, and tourists, I think everyone is a tourist.  I smell the ocean, the tide pools where gulls wade, the beach with high tide marked by seaweed, crab legs, tampon applicators, cans, and a shoe.  All washed up, then swallowed back as waves wash and rewash the detritus off the shore.  The surf roars, the sea lions bark, the gulls hop around following in the footprints of children and women.  The prayers of unspectacular sunsets, the lights of the pier and I’m feeling nostalgic for lovers, for childhood weeks on Cape Cod and I’m feeling the wear of nearly two weeks on the road with two more to go.  I walk the pier in the darkness, sounds not sights of sea lions become louder, heading back to the motel, Santo and Johnny plays over the speakers.  The businesses of the pier are closing for the night. The air is still far too chilly for May.  I clear the last business on the pier, the final notes of “Sleepwalking” whine above the waves.

 

Tomorrow: The San Andreas Fault with a Winchester Rifle waiting on the rapture.

 

 

 

Day 15: Cal-Train Sunset

 

San Francisco

 

        For some reason boarding the train back to Menlo Park, I can’t get The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” out of my head.  Saturday night, berths full of drunks fresh from a Giants win, head south towards San Jose.  On this the day of the rapture I leave the bubble of automobile for trains and shoe leather.  I beat pavement for nearly seven miles across the city.  Now I watch unspectacular California sunsets over train stations, exhausted.  Earlier, ass parked on a bench overlooking the bay the Golden Gate Bridge to my left, Alcatraz to my right, the sailboats flittered by shaking the wake of freighters like gnats.

       

Fillmore from Haight, boutiques (god, I hate that word) far as the eye can see, restaurants Victorian housing growing in grandness with the increasing tax brackets.  Two miles later near Fort Mason the opulence is nearly blinding.

 

        Haight by accident, the hippies are hipsters and the hipsters are taking over.  I overhear some lady say that fashion hasn’t changed in ten years.  Burrito, Chicken and Mole, Record Shop Groceria, Miles of Isles, the reality of this place drifts away.

 

        Fourth Street runs into Stockton, Stockton turns to Ellis, things get fucking jumbled my brain compass is failing.  Walking the ghetto on the backside of Nob Hill, half a mile back I heard a lady yell at a Toyota truck. “That’s alright baby, I just tell ‘em I already cum.” 

 

        Chinatown, the soup kitchen serves lunch and the homeless are lined up around the block and all the way up the next.  This may be the apocalypse; a man pisses on a tree.

 

        The dark settles in, Cal-Train conductors yell out stops through marbles.  Meatheads decked in sports memorabilia attempt mating rituals with big girls.  I rock and sway in places, my pen smears across the page.  I think back on the morning ride, where the lesbian behind me is talking to her friend about how they want half and half babies, and then shift directly to their new or next hairstyle.  A gathering sea of neon and halogen, train stop names glow in the dark, California Drive, San Carlos, El Camino Real, Atherton.  Maps fade, San Francisco disappears.

 

Tomorrow: Sir Doug, the Search for Bigfoot Begins!

 

 

Day 16: Bigfoot and Reptids, Oh My!

 

Menlo Park to Garberville, California (300 miles)

 

After two days off, little movement, fewer miles, I return to grey traces which motivate this journey.  Route 1 north from San Francisco becomes two lanes, winding along the coast then turning at brief intervals into the rolling hills of farmland.  Most of the day is spent pumping the brake, giving a little gas, banking right turns, and then pulling directly to the left as the road dictates.  Repeat this, order changing depending on the wind of the road.

 

The Northern California coast is a playground for the super-rich.  Evidence of that can be found just east of Jenner, where the Bohemian Grove stands, as well as in the gated private shore community of Sea Ranch.  I am among the illuminati, they pass in Porches, run me off the road in BMW’s, and then there are black nameless trucks that appear out of nowhere to tailgate.  I hear reptilian hissing as I stop at some beach, where couples walking quickly have to re-mask themselves so as not to be recognized in their true form.  There are Reptoids everywhere, I must tread carefully.

 

East swings at Leggett lead into the mountains.  This is where the great Redwood forest begins, mostly pristine except for the consistency of pavement.  Quickly, I’m lost in another time.  This is Bigfoot country complete with cheesy roadside attractions: drive through trees, grandfather trees, wood carved Bigfoots and mystery spots.

 

Garberville welcomes with small non-chain hotels, Laundromats and Main Street Cafes, stretching out over two blocks.  I’m more than happy to stick a nail in the day. 

 

This is my third Sunday on the road.  The miles come hard; the wear of the road is almost a hangman’s noose.  For the first time since leaving, Pittsburgh is on me and I’m homesick. 

 

There is only one thing to do in these moments, press the accelerator and keep it between the ditches.

 

Tomorrow: John Muir in a three piece suit buys Richard Brautigan a cheeseburger.

 

 

Day 17: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

 

Garberville, California to Coos Bay, Oregon (300 miles)

 

        Humboldt Redwoods State Park, Weott California, where Banana Slugs take their time slithering across trails between clover patches.  Birds nest in tree canopies, at least a hundred feet above and sing like fire alarms.  Over on rock sits a Bigfoot, reading a Jack Cady novel.  As I approach, he rises. 

       

        Bigfoot: “Hey, what’s up?  I’ve been following your blog posts on Facebook and figured you’d be coming this way.  I messaged you the other night but maybe you didn’t get it.  The wife and I have some Buffalo Burgers ready to fry up, got a few extra redwood bunks if you’d like.”

 

        Alright so only a small portion of that is true.  There’s a lot of time to kill out here riding the Woodsy the Owl highway straight up the ass of Yeti.  I make crazy shit up just to make time pass, to make the road disappear and mostly I promptly forget what I just made up.  Sometimes all that’s left to do is stand next to a giant redwood tree and reenact Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere album cover sans the Jack Russell Terrier.

       

        Cowgirls lost in Pacific rainstorms serve a family style meal of fried chicken at the Samoa Cookhouse, which is damn close to the best meal I’ve had on this trip.  Loretta Lynn plays for my soup, Ernest Tubb plays for my beans, Merle Haggard plays for my seconds and Dolly Parton sings “Jolene” to send me to the parking lot.  Everyone should eat in an old logger’s mess hall at least once in their life.

       

        California tumbles into the sea, Elton John sings about social diseases and herds of Roosevelt Elk start to appear in greater numbers.  Route 1 became 101 hours ago, the ocean is almost always on the left.  Waves pummel humpback rocks, spray rises in the air.  Oregon realizes you’re human and rewards you by making all their shorelines free and open to the public.

 

Tomorrow:  The first wagon train on the Oregon Trail finally arrives.

 

 

Day 18: No Direction Home

 

Coos Bay to Portland, Oregon (250 miles)

 

        I’m staying in the Eastside Lodge on Burnside Street, this may have been a Holiday Inn once but now it’s a tawdry faceless motel leaning on itself to hold itself up.  I got an ice bucket you can play drums on, kids smoke pot outside my door, and rather than offering me a toke they just act awkward when I leave the room.   I suppose, I really don’t have to leave the room, there are forty channels on the television, all in HD.  Still, hanging out in a city so Pittsburgh, but yet so Portland I wanted to wander.  There’s a karaoke bar in the parking lot, some dude was singing Journey when I left; another dude was singing Metallica when I came back.  I imagine both men wore socks in their tighty whities to augment their manhood.  If I want a drink, not in my hotel room, this is not the bar for me.  There is another bar across the street but I can’t tell whether or not it’s a strip bar and I’m a little too broke for a lap dance so why tempt myself. There’s some other bar up the street but it’s way too clean to classify as a dive and I’m not comfortable in a place like that.

 

        I enter the Douglas Fir around ten; get the stamp of a deer antler on my wrist, which now will stay with me like a prison tattoo.  Hell I’m not even sure I can walk into this bar without getting thrown out or fleeced.  This is the kinda place that forty years ago, woulda kicked my ass for being a hippie before I even reached the front stoop.  Even now I’m slightly underdressed as I walk through the log cabin entry, saddle up to the way too comfy bar seat.  I order a Fat Tire draft, which is remarkably cheap.   I hear brief bass notes of the band playing downstairs; hear Neko Case on the jukebox in this room.  I notice a huge crystal moose head on the wall, two glass doors leading onto a beautiful stone patio, and later walking to the can I notice gold flecks in the glass.  This might just be the swankest bar someone ever let a mutant like me drink in, judging from the steam punk waiter, that’s obviously not true.

 

        The bartender is flirting with the steam punk but he’s too interested in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to care or maybe he’s just not interested.  I suppose it’s none of my business but in this instance I would have chosen to flirt.  Flipping through my notes, I have no idea what to write about so I decide on a surreal run on sentence.

 

        Hens, wrens nest in gables of Cape Cod Comic Book stores, they claim as they crow that they have issues, the mornings have issues, Good Morning Star Shine, good morning thrift store clerk, good morning stock boy those donuts may run through you, and donut long may you run, Bob Dylan antique sand dunes play peek-a-boo with the ocean there are roads here that are sand, paved sand, cut and bleeding sand left to die from the vantage point for driftwood from the vantage of wild strawberries, don’t wake sleeper waves, goodbye Pacific Ocean blues, goodbye blue whale, I’m shuffling inland.

 

Tomorrow: I go grunge, that is, if I ever left.

 

 

Day 19: Surf’s Up

 

Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington (180 miles)

 

        Staring out the window of the hotel, traffic moves down Couch through sheets of rain.  I dive down the street, slipping into the donut shop, the homeless men outside creak with drizzle; my donuts taste better when dipped in rainwater.  Portland record stores pass by waterlogged.   This is part two of the Portland canal tour (part one was undertaken swimming at Powell’s last night).  Mississippi Avenue hipsters float by grabbing onto parked cars so as not to be submerged by breakers; Mississippi Records create life rafts for the wise purchaser.  The I-5 is a river, the Columbia is an island, storm clouds puff up with sense of purpose, and then become flat and lifeless stretching far as limited visibility allows.  The temperature drops as Toledo, a cutlass of water, manifests.  Napavine, Chehalis, and Centralia are in the process of inventing different types of rain for your enjoyment.  They were contemplating stinging mist, wipe out and deluge or some variant.  Olympia snorkels, Tacoma has opted to change its name to Atlantis, Federal Way is now a water park with free admission to the public.  If you’re in Seattle, you can find me on the Space Needle.  It’s the last place in the northwest with air.

 

Tomorrow: Head East; not just a band anymore.

 

 

Day 20: Equine Raisins Neck Deep in Oatmeal Streets

 

Seattle to Spokane, Washington (300 miles)

 

        Tourist morning, dashing around Fremont gawking at statue of trolls eating Volkswagens.  Lenin marches in a new red scare, eyeless t-shirted concrete waits for buses.  The Space Needle shoots up the sky; a tourniquet was tied around a cloud I lost in the horizon.  Ye Olde Curiosity Shop sits off one pier or another on Alaska Way, P.T Barnum used to hang out there.  The walls filled with taxidermy and mummified remains speak stories of freak shows, funhouses, and Joe Gould’s Secret.  Watching a nickel peepshow my stomach rumbles which is then silenced with clam chowder at Ivar’s.  Seattle Underground Tours hint at worlds of Opium Dens, Whorehouses, and numbers joints that took over after the fire of 1889.  Pike Street Markets, stalls of fish, crafts, jerky, ice cream, vegetables, ocean smells, gulls fight over French fries.  Find the I-90, head east then south, stopping in Renton, the final resting place of Jimi Hendrix.

 

        The Cascade Mountains dictate weather outside of Seattle, the snow pack still firmly intact, rain coming in alternating sheets, the hillsides spill streams down to the Yakima.  The sun shines, the rains continue, I pass Keechelus and Cle Elum Lakes, mountains fall into high desert then miles of farms.  I’m going back to Ritzville, don’t ask why. Evening falls, Spokane, another hotel, another hamburger, another paragraph.

 

        There are two weeks left in the trip, after today I start to ramble east, then south with small variants and side trips.  I keep struggling for meaning in everything I see, but I realize on a night like tonight that I should shut up and enjoy the ride.

 

 

Day 21: Midnight at the Oasis

 

Spokane, Washington to Missoula, Montana (200 miles)

 

        I’ve been trying to find myself in Montana for somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen years.  I was supposed to be here in 1996, my first major road trip, but the transmission on my car took its last slip twenty-four hours before I hit the road.  Honestly, it was better it happened that way, I was nowhere near prepared for this kind of excursion then.  Here I am now East Broadway Avenue, the Bel Aire Motel, drinking beer from Seattle and thinking about walking to the nearest bar.

 

        We carry conceptions of the places we go; we think we know how a place looks before we get there.  Television, movies or whatever other media has brought the world to our doorstep, there is very little adventure in seeing something.  The real adventure comes from being there and experiencing that place. 

 

Washington, after crossing the Cascade Mountains, is nothing like I thought it was.  The Pacific Northwest is mostly rain forest, but in-between the Cascade and Bitterroot Ranges the land is mostly semi-arid rolling hills dotted with farms.  When I got to Idaho this morning it was exactly what I thought it should be.

 

Wallace, Idaho treated me to Potato and Green Chile soup then a brothel museum.  The Oasis brothel was closed in 1988 as the FBI was closing in on the then Sherriff of Wallace.  At the time of its abandon the Oasis was one of four working brothels all on the same street.  When their protection was gone both madam and whores fled the brothel.  The building was sold in 1993, quickly thereafter the new owner realized they had a property that was worth more as museum than building, so leaving everything “as is” the Oasis was opened for tours to the public.

 

Idaho turns to Montana at Lookout Pass, the mountains still snow-covered; this spring has been unusually cold the snow is stubborn and refuses to leave. I think about Louis and Clark trying too early to get across these mountains and getting stuck in a blizzard, killing and eating their horses and eventually taking to eating candles as they turned around and headed back.  I am not in a position to be inconvenienced by any of these problems.

 

Missoula, Montana, I take respite early pull up stakes and settle in.  After a walk around town, a pizza, a stop back at the hotel then I slink into a dive bar, wash down the last seven thousand miles with beer.  There was nothing crazy to report, I’m just trying to wrap my head around something bigger than me.

 

Tomorrow: Flag Football with the Corps of Discovery at Travelers Rest

 

 

Day 22: Howling Wilderness, Silent Canyon

 

Missoula, Montana to Boise, Idaho (467 miles)

 

        It’s nine in the morning I’m walking around a Wal-Mart in Missoula waiting for the mid-trip oil change to be done. They don’t have donuts, at least not ones that aren’t waxed and packaged. 

 

At ten in the morning I begin to unwind Route 93, the road of the day, a road that makes you appreciate the concept of being around humans.  Riding through the heart of the Bitterroot Mountains, towns are as much as seventy miles apart and towns that are inhabited run one hundred mile gaps.   Gas stations become even more irregular, the weather changes by minutes. 

 

At one point this evening I realized the temperature had shifted forty degrees from where it started (around sixty-five) then fell back to around thirty-two, here in Boise it’s around forty.  The road and the weather have much in common, 93 is called over the course of this ride the Louis & Clark Trail, The Lolo Trail, The Nez Pierce Trail, The Peaks To Craters Highway and finally the Oregon Trail.  The weather was sunny, cloudy, rain, freezing rain, snow, sleet, precipitation I could not identify, then cloudy back to sunny.  If you put those weather patterns in a bag shake it up and draw at random over twenty minute intervals you understand my day. 

 

Craters of the Moon National Monument, was my ultimate destination today with its 618 square miles of lava beds on the Snake River plain.  It is an odd alien landscape stranger than Utah desert although equally desolate. Unfortunately the weather was not cooperative, no hiking without freezing, no camera without snowflakes clouding every picture, I hurry around the loop a witness to space, without comprehending the space.

 

Upon reaching Carey I’m presented a choice, follow 93 to Twin Falls or head north to Boise and gain another day of breathing room.  The itinerary of this trip is brutal, so any time that time can be added or saved makes another portion of the trip easier. So, I opted to hang a right and soldier onto Boise, which makes today the longest day in three weeks. 

 

Exhausted I check into a motel behind a Wal-Mart, pinned against the wall of the interstate, as snow flurries continue through a May Saturday night.

 

Tomorrow: Bourbon and Water walks in the Winnemucca Memorial Day Parade.

 

 

 

 

 

Jason Baldinger has been published in The New Yinzer and Shattered Wig Press. He is author of two books of poetry, The Whiskey Rebellion (with Jerome Crooks) published in 2011 by Six Gallery Press and The Lady Pittsburgh published in 2012 by Speed and Briscoe Press.