Desert Traveler

     My flight from Philadelphia to Las Vegas on Wednesday night was delayed three hours while we waited for a storm to pass through Las Vegas. We arrived at McCarran a little after midnight. I tried sleeping in the airport. Wasn't very successful. Dawn through the large airport Windows revealed fresh snow on surrounding mountains almost as low as the valley.    
      Only three goals for Thursday;  get bike out of storage unit, obtain food for the following week, and get bike, myself, and food past the edge of town, into the desert for a place to sleep in seclusion. I was asleep by six and didn't rise from bed till dawn, which came at six.
    Seven weeks out of the saddle is long enough for a body to grow fat and soft. When I returned to Las Vegas last week to be reunited with my bicycle and return to this winter's tour I was in less than ideal shape. No matter , the best way to get back in touring shape is to go out and tour, the rest will take care of itself. Fortunately, Las Vegas provides the westbound toured with the perfect opportunity to get back into shape in a hurry. First you have to climb over Mountain Spring Pass with its elevation gain of 3500 feet. If that seems too easy then add a weeks worth of food to your bike trailer. It's a long way from Vegas to the next super market.
       On the climb I met a cyclist heading the other way, going from California to Colorado and another at the summit going my way to the coast but much faster and without all the camping. Over many years of desert travel I've run into only a handful of winter desert touring enthusiasts. Here were two on the same day, an auspicious start.
        Camped that night in the dunes near stump spring , a stop on the old Spanish trail in the early nineteenth century. From this vantage point I could see the lights of Pahrump to the north as well as the sweep of headlights coming down mountain springs pass about fifteen or twenty miles to the east. Sunset was spectacular that evening due to the dramatic clouds being torn from the Springs range and mt. Charleston by the wind.
          The old Spanish Trail connected the former Spanish colony of New Mexico with the towns, missions and ranches of California between 1826 and the Mexican war of 1848. In its earliest years it was an honest, if grueling trade route. In later years it devolved into an outlaw trail for moving Piute slaves and stolen California horses to New Mexico. Kitt Carson famously used it to transfer some of the first samples of ft. Sutter gold to Washington D.C. sparking the California gold rush. It passes through Vegas as well as Moab Utah and San Bernardino California, though most communities along its path are little aware of its significance, it's history, or even of its existence. On many of my desert rides I've enjoyed following its several paths. It's fabulous story adds dimension and depth to otherwise aimless wandering.
        The next day I leave the Spanish Trail at Tecopa hot spring to head north to Shoshone and the the trickle of the Amorgossa river. At Shoshone there are a large number of cars parked, something I've never seen there. As I get closer I see the reason why. An enormous line of people have lined up to enter its only store to by lottery tickets. The line appears to stretch for a quarter mile. These are Las Vegans who have come to this outpost of California to try their luck at the power ball lottery which has entered historic proportions. All will fail to win. Several days later it will roll over to amount to over a billion and a half dollars. Unless the traveled further to buy their lottery tickets at Chino Hills, or Tennessee or Florida the will have purchased them in vain again, at least for that grand jackpot to be split three ways.
           I camped north of Shoshone along the Amorgossa a little south of Death Valley junction. I found a coconut stuck in the mud there and broke it open . It fed me for days. Why a coconut would fall so far from any tree I didn't ask. You take what you can get when it's offered to you. Why question?
          From Death Valley junction where there is an improbably situated hotel with an improbable story of a ballerina willing a once decrepit motel back to life through her art the trail sets west again to Death Valley itself. The pass is easy to reach, with minimal grade, rewarded with eighteen miles of steady, exhilarating descent to Furnace Creek ,the headquarters of the national monument. From there, armed with new maps, I head to Stovepipe Wells and a night in the dunes. The National Monument is a difficult place for free camping. It's part of the National Park service, which frowns on such behavior, and it's mostly open desert land, which doesn't allow itself to easy concealment. You've got to know the territory pretty well, or be extraordinarily lucky to make it happen. It's part of my religion to never pay for a campsite and avoid campgrounds altogether. This is not a religion recognized by the Federal government or any of its branches.
         The next day finds me on the very long ascent to Towne Pass, then veering southward for the still longer ascent of Emigrant Pass. It takes me all day. I begin the descent near sundown, passing a herd of wild burros along the way, as I drop into Wildrose Canyon, which is blessedly wet, fed by a small spring, at its head. A little picnic ground, two or three miles further down, provides a place to sleep conveniently out of the rising wind. Not much chance of being discovered here, the park has closed the road due to washouts.  I have the Panamint mountains all to myself, and the delicious sound of wind of Palm fronds being shaken by the wind to lure me into sleep.
          Wednesday it was south through Panamint valley to Trona. Trina is an odd town of tar paper shacks and unpaved streets like something out of the third world. The major industry is the extraction and processing of minerals from Searles Lake, an enormous dry lake about fifteen miles east of Ridgecrest. As I passed through town I went by the only other cyclist in town at that moment, a black man, who looked up and declared " a desert traveler". I guess I look it. Ill own it.

Living a normal life

    Do you remember Heaven's Gate, that sci-fi cult founded in the 1970s by a nut-job named Marshall Applewhite? The group achieved national attention in 1997 when they ingested poison together in their San Diego compound in hopes of being translated to an alien spaceship believed to be following in the wake of the Hale Bopp comet. When their thirty-nine bodies were found a few days later by police they were dressed in matching black track suits, wearing identical purple sneakers and purple hankies over their faces. Conformity was an important aspect of their religion. Dressing alike, thinking alike, speaking alike, and even sharing a taste for the same foods were markers of their superiority. They were plainly too good to remain among us so they  separated themselves entirely from mankind through mass suicide. Conformity alone does not guaranty normality. If it did then ultra-conformists like the Heaven's Gate members would be considered paragons of normalcy. If they were normal, the word is meaningless.
      For most of my life I've stuck to a personal conception of normal living. It may not look like anyone else's idea of how to get by. That doesn't matter. If others judge normal by how their neighbors are doing, then I wish them well. Good luck with that. Hope you don't end up wearing a purple hanky over your face. For me conformity never seemed attractive.  Conformity never even crossed my mind.
     Einstein may not have come up with the idea that every object contains energy, but he determined the extent of that energy with his well known formula E= mc2. Multiply the amount of mass of something by the speed of light squared and you know exactly how much energy it contains. There is not much in that formula for me to put to any practicable use. Those with a better grasp of the physics and the mechanics of the principle are able to unleash the hidden potential of a single atom and destroy half a medium sized city, or blow holes in the Mojave desert. The sun creates energy in the form of heat and light through a similar process, demonstrating that you don't have to be a nuclear scientist to split atoms. Put all the atoms of my body to good use and you may be able to create a blast of energy that could be seen from Andromeda and send planets out of their accustomed orbits. I don't really know. There's the energy of mass and then there's life energy. Unlike nuclear energy, it's easily understood, and readily available. It surrounds you and courses through you. How much of it will be used and how much let slip away?  When all is said and done, I will doubtless look back at enormous potential wasted,  never developed, poorly managed, and seldom sustained. The same can be said for us all. I have to agree with Thoreau who said that he had never met a man who was fully alive, and if he did, he wouldn't be able to look him in the face.
      Naturally, I value most the parts of my life where I invest the most energy, or is it the other way round?  On the higher energy side there is painting scenes. I can live off the money it brings in, but what it brings in wouldn't sustain anyone else I can think of. Being homeless has its benefits. Painting is superb for letting off steam. It's also a means for exploring. Painting is the soul of adventure. There is also adventure of the more traditional sort. When I take to the back roads on a bicycle loaded with camping gear, or to some hidden piece of shoreline in a similarly loaded sea kayak, I feel fully engaged in with life in a way that not even painting can touch.
      That is living for me. That is normal. Most everything else is purposed to get me back on the saddle or in the cockpit. For twenty-two years free wheeling travel ruled, but over the last ten it's enjoyed a little less than equal time. That maybe the new normal, but not in my mind.
        Tomorrow I'll be back on the trail. My bike is packed and ready to be freed from its storage locker in Las Vegas. I'm flying there tonight. Soon it will be back to sleeping inside a tent, and outside the law. Ill be free and breathing again. Ill be surrounded by beauty. Ill be wet when it rains, and cursing when it blows. Ill be satisfied at the end of the day, and the next morning ready to do it all again. Ill be normal.