Some pictures of the effects of water in the desert: erosion, weathering, rusting, storage. Doug found the "cast iron sardine can" in the sand at this campsite, I found the sparkplug "sardines" at mine. The roadcut is at the turnoff from to 395 to Lower Rock Creek canyon. My favorite picnic table, my 20-year-old Reliance five-gallon waterbag.
What did I think would happen when I packed the household detritus of 22 years of Bay Area life into storage, loaded my Tacoma pickup truck and drove off to the Eastern Sierra to live in a BLM campground?
1. A JOLT -- to untangle myself from having gotten snared in some bad emotional and mental habits, such as: resentment and bewilderment at aging, disappointment over unrealized career hopes, inability to accept compromised behavior in the institutions to which I had become attached, overindulgence in sweets. I hoped to be cracked out of stagnation, to become available for, or perhaps to engineer, a renewal of possibility, appreciation, engagement.
REALITY: Cutting losses is good, but not the same as regeneration; I am dislocated, but not yet re-located, not re-oriented in a new habit of living.
2. A REST -- recovery from fatigue; to restore deeply depleted reserves.
REALITY: Car camping has its own problems, (note previous Blog entries) time taken up meeting basic needs: get clean, get water, get grub, get wildlife washed out of my truck... hassling with money, shelter, neighbors, heat, wind, lonliness and the lack of customary conveniences.
YET IT IS ALSO TRUE that as I run out of, and stop using, a variety of medications the prescription of which had been escalating through Kaiser Permanente's attempts to mitigate my proliferating manifestations of stress, I do feel better. Romping around in a campsite stretches and reconditions muscles I hadn't been using while sitting for long hours at a computer. I am not in conflict with anyone or any institution. The low-rent lifestyle is low-key and dull, there is little traffic in the desert towns along 395. I have few and simple social contacts, no exterior responsibilites, no personal drama. Desert rest is boring; but perhaps this is exactly what I need.
3. Cheaper Living --to save money even while living only on the reduced income of EDD benefits. So far, per month:
BLM campsite rent -- $100.00 per month (or less if I stay longer on the LTVA permit plan)
Ice -- $40.00
Propane -- $20.00 (camp stove only, and it is too hot to cook)
Cell phone -- $40.00
Water -- free (when downloaded from park spigot in Bishop)
WIFI -- $50.00 (coffee drinks to gain seat in Free WIFI zone)
Laundromat -- $50.00 (includes soap)
Showers -- $50.00 (purchase from gas station vendors about twice a week, supplement to bucket baths)
Appx. rent/utilities per month: $350 (if I stick to budget), which is $450 less than my previous rent (for equivalent items, such as refrigerator instead of icebox, electricity and all the things that use it, heat, stove, couch, hot and cold running water, showers, cupboards, stand up in and hang out indoors, etc. So real rent, especially housing that includes air conditioning, is well worth the difference, when you can afford it. But this way I can save some money for setting up in a new situation, whenever I figure out what that might be and have gotten a job there. (Food and gas are not included in the list of expenses above, and can be cheap or not depending on what I choose to eat or where I choose to go, as is true in any circumstance.)
4. A Survival Test. I wanted to know if I could survive a personal economic/circumstantial meltdown by living in my car. I wanted to test my belief that many US citizens live on the fringes of American civilization in mobile poverty by car camping on federal bureau of land management land, "wasteland," and other outskirts, boonies, and vacant property.
There are echelons within the uplugged lifestyle, from dry camping (in designated campgrounds without hookups) and boondocking (dry camping wherever..) to sidewalk hugging. (Full-time RV vehicle residents who can afford RV parks with hookups to electricity, water, wifi, cable TV and sewer usually have incomes that preclude poverty status). I entered the dry camping echelon at about mid-range: no self-contained rig, but a solid vehicle with hardside shelter, complete tent-camping equipment and some cash in the bank.
I got to meet some of the people who live in the BLM campgrounds of the Eastern Sierra. They directed me to free meal opportunities, free water, free showers, health care and town-dump stuff mines. I saw my neighbors help each other with auto and rig repair and modification, recreation and protection from over-zealous law enforcement. They have learned how to get by for years on combinations of disability and retirement benefits, small pensions, food stamps, odd jobs, charity handouts, and sporadic help from family members. They form social networks of information and material exchange that support and protect this lifestyle. I know that legal housing is so regulated and so costly that RV drycamping has become the housing of choice for anyone whose income is not enough, and never will be enough, to buy a residence or rent code-compliant housing.
I found that many, if not most, of my neighbors drink cheap beer most days, all day. I think the cost and debilitation of daily hard drug use brings people down to the sidewalk level harder and faster than beer, but I can't guess if beer drinking is a steady-state condition or a stage on the way down for most drycampers.
Now that I have had a brief and shallow taste of living in a vehicle on public land, I feel I can manage its demands and difficulties if/when I have to. However, long-term and winter camping would be too difficult with the vehicle I have; for a permanent full-timing life on the road I would need a real self-contained RV: insulated, air-conditioned, heated, insured, solar-powered and large enough inside to paint.
5. A Magical Destination --a new adventure within which I will reconstellate as a member of an newly enchanted world, and experience a feeling of having arrived, of being in the right place at the right time.
REALITY: Not a future direction, but nostalgia: I realize I am longing for a return to something wonderful in the past, such as Alta Loma, Upland, Claremont, Haight-Ashbury, Immaculate Heart, Venice Beach in the 1970's, publishing NATIVE with friends, etc. I no longer live in the enchanted springtime, I am 61 years old, and the ordinary world withers under my insatiable demand that it engage me romantically or be judged deficient.
Similarly, while housesitting in Venice Beach for two weeks in June, for an old school friend and her husband vacationing in Scotland, I found everything there to be quite pleasant but murky with my own nostalgia. Beach and boardwalk do not now put me in touch with the edge of something magical, dreamy, transcendent. Everywhere I visit nowadays in the Basin I compare to memories of LA in the 1970's, forty years ago when I was in my 20s and had fallen in love with spacey, laid-back West Los Angeles. I am still haunted by my memories of those years -- probably because I was young, and therefore everything was new and exotic and elicited romantic response.
Summer camping in the desert in itself is neither entertaining nor romantic, or not as much as I had hoped, of course, since in the past I had only visited the Eastern Sierra during the fresh spring rain wildflower time, or the spectacular autumn colors season. And my "memories" are as much formed by photographs and written mystique about the area as they are by actual memories of my own. It has its many charms, but they are grounded in reality, and I am not.
6. An Inspiring Circumstance to nourish some new poems with the juice of reality: the "Crockett Mary" character poems in my new group which I am now calling The Fifth Direction. An experience of living in my imaginary retired narrator's chosen "homelessness", or mobile living RV lifestyle, (I wonder if it means I should try to drift down to Quartzite, AZ, and live the BLM winter life down in the low western desert near the river and the border.)
REALITY: I do not have enough money, nor an adequate vehicle, for an extended RV lifestyle right now, since it would require many additional costs for traveling and purchase of a self-contianed, winter-worthy vehicle. (Although I suppose that many people who have chosen it often did so without enough of anything to do so.)
BUT, ALSO TRUE! -- my current haphazard circumstances for painting (the acrylic dries too fast to mix colors on the palette or alter strokes on the page) is having an effect on how I paint; I am experiencing a loosening of process, much mixed media and messiness. Strong darks, graphic compositions, expressive color. Painting fast and loose. I am very pleased with them so far; I have no idea what this change in style may mean. My poetry, too, is changing. Shorter, less narrative, less discursive -- more like the paintings, perhaps. I had turned towards these forms before my employment changed; my desert lifestyle is supporting their development.
July 24 2010, Horton Creek campsite.
July has been very hot, most days 100 degrees F and higher, which folks in town tell me "We're having August weather in July". The air gets gooey, there's no dry breeze to cool the sweaty, lethargic camper. But similar to the Bay Area weather pattern of hot valley air drawing fog through the Golden Gate into the east bay hills, thunder storms condense out of the mountain air and spike the lake areas over 8,000 feet, and sometimes blow down into the valleys. Today a real howler slammed out of the Sierra down the escarpments and the Crate is rockin' safe and dry and pretty comfy in the warm, wet blasts, sheltering me from sporadic sand, rain and hail. I sit against a pillow upside the peg-boarded driver's side wall and write this on my laptop. Fire trucks from the Forestry Folks and the local Fire Dept.s have been cruising around the watersheds, since dry lightning is a serious fire hazard; they are pleased for even a little moisture in the dark booming clouds. The cloud show hikes up a notch, from gorgeous to spectacular.
As I was sitting Sunday morning MMOB in my creekside campsite and reflecting that since it was indeed the 4th of July and proper public fireworks would be exploding safely at the Bishop Airport, courtesy of the Bishop Volunteer Fire Department (suggested donation for parking close 20 bucks), that I ought to go out and enjoy it. The 20 bucks slowed me down, my fearful fantasy of crowds of strangers tailgating in giant pickup trucks with barbecues, boomboxes and teenagers stopped me cold -- I sometimes freak out in crowds, especially when I'm by myself.
VA-ROOM popppity poppity poppity -- Greg (not his real name) toured around the firepit on his dirtbike and silenced to a stop at my picnic table with a proposal: Would I drive his car to the fireworks show with himself and two of his Horton drinking buddies as passengers, who all have at least a first DUI apiece, and would all, by 9:00 PM, be too hammered to drive?
"We were wondering what to do, and then I thought of you, just sitting here on the 4th of July holiday wasting all your sobriety ..."
I said maybe OK, and he peeled out to pow-wow with his mates. At 7:00 PM he popped in again and said, "It's just you and me, babe. Those guys chickened out."
Since I am nervous about driving an automatic shift (all my cars are/were stick shift), we took a practice spin in his muscle car around the pasture roads of Round Valley. He declared me fit to chauffeur, "You didn't hit anything, let's go." I told him his beer had to be locked in the trunk, nothing open, and nothing else stashed anywhere in the car. We packed chairs and jackets, I brought water and he brought a double plastic bag full of beer cans and a paper coffee latte cup with plastic sip-top, "Hides the foam."
I drove us to Von's at the edge of town, where a road skirts the airport. We parked in a dirt lot between a smelly canal and some fenced property, and started to walk closer. Greg was cussing and jerking "These mosquitoes are killing me, ow! ow!" Welts everywhere, we trudged back to the car, where he gassed himself with repellant. He decided to stay right by the car, the bug spray and the extra beer. The lot was filling up with giant trucks full of kids. I said we should take the chairs and try to get away from the cars, but Greg decided to sulk, and sat with his beer in the middle of the lot, headlights careening around him. "You can go, go on, you just go do anything you want, I'm staying right here."
I took my chair down a side road until I found a place between a van and a large RV where I could see the sky over the airport area in the distance. I got up to fetch Greg, but he wouldn't come. I said "Please." He scowled and opened the car door. I picked up his chair and said "I'm taking this to a better place for you." He scowled worse, but I walked off with his chair. I sat alone in the dusk watching a few warm-up sparkly things. Finally I heard his footsteps come up behind me. He moved his chair away from mine, and fell into it. But I scooted up and we sat in grumpy silence while the stars came out over the White Mountains. The show was late. The RV got tired of waiting and left, and so did the van. We had a perfect, spacious, quiet view.
We both yelled at the first big bursts. Then it was fun, and gorgeous, and worth all the fuss, and lasted a long time. Hooray for the Bishop Volunteer Fire Department for truly wonderful fireworks in the desert night!
Driving home to Horton, we agreed that we had worked well as a team: I wouldn't have come without his plan and company, and he couldn't have come without my driving. God Bless America.
Home Sweet Home?
The desert rats that used my truck's ducts for a squat were looking for a safe enclosure in unregulated territory; similarly, I am trying to resolve my need for security while still surrounded by horizons on all sides.
I find it is difficult for me to paint at a picnic table or portable easel in these wide-open vistas; my perception, imagination, apperception floats in the vista, aware of it, inhabiting it, hovering in it and never coming to rest, to focus on the page, the corral of relationahip between imagination and expression in two dimensions. Staying inside, as if the outside required no further attention, appears to be the circumstance I need for expression in painting, writing: the studio, the cell, the carrell, the cabin, the trailer. On the desert, at the beach, in the hills I feel good sitting and moving, driving in it, walking in it. Outdoors means activities: hiking, exploring, rolling along. But the page requires a cloister.Like a hermit crab or tortoise, I need a shell to house my vulnerable interior workings.
BUT, I am ambivalent about staying Inside: there is a counter-current streaming against sheltered stability from my childhood when I could find no place to be solitary and daydreaming that was safe from my mother's intrusion. She was particularly wary of reverie -- interrupting any far-away stares into space by teasing ridicule and waving her hands in front of the the offending young face, or she would burst suddenly through a closed door into a quiet room and demand to know: "you're being too quiet in there, what are you up to?" When the answer was "I'm reading!", or worse "Just thinking.." , she would throw a mini-fit of exasperation, seething in a helpless fury; there was no family ban on reading. Often she would order me to stop what I was doing and go outside and get some exercise.
I grew up in a "ranch house," those sprawling one-storey suburban stucco-and-shingled contractor's Tract Houses, wherein there is no attic, garret, basement, cellar, walk-in closet, nook, cranny or windowseat. All of these generous architectural features had been cheated down to fit into the Two-Car Garage. All the relics of secrets and hidden histories were stuffed into a two-by-four and plywood platform built across the back of the garage. The cellar reduced to a crawl space, the attic gutted to accommodate hoods of cars parked beneath it. Barrels, boxes, chests-- my father's Naval WWII uniforms and equipment, my mother's sorority scrapbooks and Red Cross memorabilia, oddball wedding gifts (Tiki snack trays, etc.), too tacky to use, too sentimental to drop at the Goodwill.
To counter our mother's discomfort at our interior lives, my older brother built "forts" in the this garage, at first rearranging the sidelines boxes and cabinets to create small cubbies or privacy nests against the walls, and finally burrowing up into the storage platform through a disguised trap door furtively sawed through its plywood floor, replete with a small rug, snack box, and a pirated electric wire tap for ham radio. He had no illegal or immoral hobbies to hide; he just wanted a safe place to think his own thoughts.
My younger brother would space out in front of the TV for hours seemingly engrossed in Lassie, Steve Allen or World War II documentary reruns, but one day when I tried to have a conversation with him about something on the screen we were both sitting in front of, I realized he wasn't actually watching the programs or the ads, he was daydreaming. He masked his separate soul from our mother in a pretence of non-threatening involvement with something inane.
My own solitude was smuggled from supervision by loitering outside the house. Taking the family dog for a walk was the trap door of my escape into a vacant acre of unsubdivided city land above the local grammar school where excavated earth from city building projects had been dumped, forming small hillocks overgrown with mallow, milkweed, oatgrass and stickerweed. It's corrugated contour provided a screen; I was semi-hidden strolling there. I never met anyone else there. I may have looked like a kid playing with a dog, or with other kids momentarily out of sight. But the dog was a cover, I was daydreaming on my feet. Years later when I first heard Ben E. King's recording of "Up On the Roof", I knew that musicians, and their listeners, understood me.
Today I wonder if my summer sojourn on BLM land is another escape to a vacant field. A place to get away from the intrusion of social demands to conform one's interests, possessions, apparel, appearance, activities, schedule; to avoid criticism, intrusion, ridicule, exasperation, and my repeated disappointment of some one else's expectations. To enter again the masked chamber of the secret soul, to hole-up in a hidden fort, and abide there unengaged, undetected, unusable. Now, I also need to find a spiritual home where I can pray in peace, a shelter where I can write and paint while shielded from the weather.
I got ready to go into town, tied up the loose things, stashed the loose bits, rolled out onto Pothole Lane, and switched on the Air. Blamma-bumpa-blamma,
whap whap whap, ka-flumpa
ka-chunk KA-CHUNK,
happity-bappity, rumbledy bumbledy
BUMP kruncha kaboodledy BLAM !!!
Switch off the air: silent.
Air switched back on: front end roars.
At the local Toyota Dealer Services Center they knew instantly:
Desert rat drawn and quartered in the AC fan.
"It's like a hamster wheel, see, but with blades inside,"
the nice young man in blue told me, grinning and wrinkling his nose.
"They climb in the intake ducts. Good that you came in right away,
before it started to rot."
The fellow in latex gloves who had to wash out the "mouse carcus" (as typed in the invoice) was very helpful and showed me where to try and place some screen to block the critters, but also shrugged and said they can chew through most materials and creep in anywhere. They also found a rat's nest in the engine air intake box, feathered with shredded air filter.
Next stop Ace hardware, where I got a clamp and a "hobbyist" size miniature bolt cutter. Ace threw in a foot of wire mesh for free. Back at my Horton Creek campsite I rigged a short tube of mesh and clamped it around the air duct under the air filter so that the tunneling mouse would be blocked from homesteading the filter box. In the cab, I switched the air circulation mode from outside air to inside air, which may or may not effectively block rodent access to the air circulation system.
As I worked, across the road my neighbor Doug scraped old coating off the roof of his bus-sized RV in preparation for installing solar panels. Constant modification of transport/living space comes with the territory, and my mouse blockade marks my first on-the-road RV modification experience. a milestone in the RV camping lifestyle!
So, you may ask, what have sunset photos got to do with car repair?
What, you wanted to see pictures of ripped-apart rat?
