The Last Road Trip (III)

September 12, 2005

The Insecto Amarillo cleared for takeoff at 7:40 a.m. with seven-eighths of a tank of gas, 102,995 on the odo, and the elephant-headed god Ganesh, remover of obstacles, perched on the dashboard.

The odometer turned 103K at the corner of Dillon and Palm in Desperate Hot Springs.

Up out of the valley we go, up through Yucca and Joshua Tree and then the last oasis, the jumping-off spot of Twentynine Palms. After that, no services for 100 miles, and no people, no traffic, no clouds, no worries, no searing heat (it's just a little over 70 degrees), no wind, no trash along the the roadway, which is clean and clear as the sky above.

No problems.

How strange it is to be alone, after experiencing the horror of Los Angeles only day before yesterday. The desert is unusually, brightly green right now after last winter's exceptional rains, and a carpet of vermillion fuzz covers the ground in the spaces between the dark green bushes.

Going slowly on the two-lane feels like floating. My little VW, seen from above, must look like a tiny, lone insect crawling determinedly across the immense, empty, desolate desert floor.

“In the desert, you can remember your name, ‘cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain,” says the song. How true, and painless until my camel reaches the next Oasis, Needles, CA, where we experience the only heat of the trip so far (95 degrees) and the worst gas prices ($3.79). Needles has always been like that.

It was merely a reminder that this is the last road trip, because in the near future an excursion like this won’t be possible, at least not for me. What I paid for gas in Needles today, everybody will be paying at this time next year.

At Needles I'm forced to enter I-40 for about ten miles, and after one false start we turn onto the street of dreams (and it really should be a national monument), just across the Arizona line.

You can't be in too much of a hurry when you travel this part of Route 66. In some places the roadway is not in the greatest condition, and there's a lot of winding and curving as you descend, then climb into the tourist trap and old mining town of Oatman. I wouldn't recommend stopping, although it might be fun to slow down just enough to take a picture of the one of the burros.

After Oatman comes the real slowdown, and it's switchback city from there to the top of Sitgreaves Pass, 3550 feet above sea level and almost that high above the Colorado River a few miles back. This part of the road is very rugged, very beautiful, and extremely slow, all the way up and all the way down.

But once down you're cruising, through Kingman, an overgrown wide spot in the road, and on to the easy motoring part of 66, which runs through the Hulapai Indian Nation and 80 miles out to the little town of Seligman.

It was on this part of the road that I passed through the home of Krazy Kat, Ignatz the Mouse, and that dog policeman. I didn't see any of them, but I recognized the landscape:

In Coconino County they did dwell;
In Coconino County, known full well...

By this time I was beat. By the time I pulled into Seligman I'd logged only 360 miles in eight hours of driving. This little town, attractive in some ways, but with all the appearances of a blatant tourist trap (no other visible means of livelihood), appears not to host any large, corporate chain-type businesses, except for the gas pumps.

But the virtue of the independent, family-owned business can be a double edged sword, as I found out when I checked into the Broken Arms Motel. That's where I found out that while I was a solitary traveller crossing the desert, Los Angeles had been plunged into total anarchy and collapse by a massive power outage which knocked out lights, air conditioners, elevators, and traffic signals all the way from downtown to the ocean and all the way north to and including the San Fernando Valley.

God save us from such nightmares.

(More to come.)