Road to Nowhere

I love America. It’s like the big brother I never had – often in trouble, occasionally despised by the neighbours, constantly messing things up but somehow managing to coast by on graft, charm, and sly charisma. It’s a bit dodgy, displays questionable judgment from time to time, yet all it has to do is give you one of those smiles and you know you’re willing to forgive it just one more time.

America is a land of either/or – in many ways there’s no shades of gray. You’re with us, or against us. You’re an ally, or a terrorist. You’re a waffling, spendthrift, no good liberal, or a gun-totin, mama grizzly lovin’ conservative. Naturally this view is blinkered, possibly flat out wrong – there are shades of gray, of course, it’s just that the press seems to reduce complex issues to oversimplified, pre-digested positions suitable for easy consumption. Varying viewpoints are too challenging, and require too much time and effort to explain (big shout out to Noam Chomsky) – it’s easier to just restate the status quo so everyone can relax.

Food is just one more thing that represents this land of dichotomy. Go through the aisles of a supermarket and it’s quickly apparent that food falls into categories  - the puritanical, guilt-laden “no net carb/no sugar/no calories/no fat” camp, versus the heaving, corpulent “no-holds-barred/full-fat/extra sugar/lard me up, boys food of champions” team. All such contenders for your shopping dollar are given equal respect, however – you’ll find both, often side by side, on the same aisle. People routinely push trolleys full of diet cola and frozen pizza. Matter, and anti-matter perhaps. Maybe they cancel one another out.

But I digest.

After a fleeting few days in San Diego it was, regrettably, time to leave. When I say leave, it’s a bit misleading – we never actually arrived in San Diego, instead just slouching about on the outskirts, missing turn-offs on the spaghetti of interstates, seeing the tourist attractions but never quite getting to the heart of the city. My impressions of it therefore are ill-formed, yet somehow favorable – there seems to be something about the place I don’t mind, and could learn to like, and if I get the chance to return and have a genuine look around, I will.

After a brief opportunity to display our Hicksville roots at Target (“Hey, look, an escalator for trolleys!”) and the customary wrong turn, we hit I-8 East and put the pedal to the floor for Palm Springs.

Apart from a brief break to allow Jackson to empty his guts all over the road, the first stop was Julian, a hard town to pigeon-hole – in my usual snide way it’d be nice to write it off as a wild-west pastiche, all old buildings, sidewalks, ornate lettering and the like, but the place has something that really is quite charming about it. Sure, it caters to the tourist crowd but then so does any other number of small towns – and so what, anyway? And it’s got one thing in its favour – Mom’s Pie House. I’d read of it before, heard nothing but enthusiastic reviews, but the simple truth is that the place really is sensational – teams of women in flour-dusted clothing and faces work in tandem, building a seemingly endless number of pies. When we were there, it was cherry pie – one was preparing the pie tins, the next was ladling cherries into the pie, the third cutting latticework from short-crust pastry to lay over the top, and the fourth was sliding them into industrial ovens, the only concession to modernity. We lashed out the $10 on an over-run Apple Flaky Pastry Pie, and it was absolutely sensational.

Taking the advice of a woman wreathed in a heady blend of patchouli and rose oil at a aromatherapy shop on the main drag, we headed for Borrego Springs. It’s a weird place, settled in a giant amphitheatre in the middle of a mountain range. Somehow it’s how I imagine Palm Springs would have been sixty or seventy years ago, before big money and Hollywood types moved in and took over the place. I’m damned if I know what I’d do there all day if I lived there, but it had a strange charm about it all the same. After a couple of hot laps of Christmas Circle we found the right turn off, got to the trailhead of the Oasis Valley walk in the middle of Anza-Borrego State Park, and set off.

If you ever find yourself in this part of the world, do the walk – it’s a sensational 3 mile round trip taking in Cholla cactus, Ocotillo, river washes and rugged mountains, the prospect of possible Big Horn Sheep, Roadrunner, Rattlesnake and even Mountain Lion sightings, and the entire walk culminates in a small series of rapids, alongside which is a grove of California Fan Palms pressed together shoulder to shoulder in a narrow valley. The return walk was almost as good, coming down through an ever widening valley as the sun dipped below peaks bringing on a false dusk, only to be back on the valley floor in broad daylight. Unfortunately it was now 5:00pm, and we still had the best part of a couple of hours to do.

We pressed on rapidly, running alongside mountain ranges that looked more like Kazakhstan than California, passing through badlands, and ultimately began to descent downward, weaving along the tops of canyon walls, and out to a Salton Sea shining like satin-finished pewter against darkening, brown mountains beyond.

I swung the car north and we traveled in convoy with a seemingly infinite number of freight trucks, stopped bleary eyed at a truckstop out of Coachilla where English seemed very much a second language, had a quick pizza and some juice then pressed on yet again, finally making it to Palm Springs.

A note for the reader – if you ever hit Palm Springs from I-10 West, you’ll drive for miles along East, then West, Ramon Road without actually ever catching sight of the damn town. Turns out it effectively runs along the edge of the downtown area. Obvious by day, less so at night when you’re squinting through a bug-encrusted windscreen begging for a hotel sign to magically appear before you, and signal an end to the days travel.

At last our luck changed for the better, and we stumbled upon an “America’s Best Value Inn” complete with sketchy wifi access, dragged everything from the back of the car up a flight of stairs to room 218, wrote up a couple of days worth of travel notes, and keeled over face first onto a bed in a state of rapturous, completely knackered, bliss.