On the Back Roads (17 page)

I have lived here in Palos Verdes, south of Los Angeles, for twenty-five years, which is as long as I have lived in any one place. I guess it is home. This is where my kids grew up. Both of them, Chris and Kathy, are grown now. In fact, Kathy recently made me a picture-toting grandfather.

Serene and comfortable, this gorgeous Palos Verdes Peninsula is surprisingly isolated and disconnected from the craziness of the big city. It is a marvelous place to live, a community of wonderful people. For the past couple of years, however, Palos Verdes for me has been just a closet and a mailbox.

Back to living a conventional, rooted life here—albeit temporarily—I crossed paths at Hughes Market with a veterinarian friend of mine. He, too, has a motor home and travels alone. Well, not really. e takes along his 130-pound Engiish mastiff.

“The dog sleeps on the floor. I'm stepping around him most of the time,” my friend said as we walked to the parking lot. “But you can't beat the companionship, if you don't mind stumbling over it.”

He could see that I was listening well. Then he mentioned a stray female pup that was being fussed over by all the people in his clinic. A young girl who works for him, assisted by her boyfriend, rescued her from a busy city intersection. He told me that the dog was traumatized by the traffic, too scared to move, which probably saved her life. So to get her mind off her trauma, her rescuers took her to McDonalds for lunch. “I can't speak to her early days, but her last few have been the good life,” he said.

Advertising for her owner the past week had not surfaced one.

“After I bring her up to code, she will be a perfect dog for a guy like you. She is mostly lab, probably won't get over sixty pounds. Not a big dog.”

Sure, not big by his standards.

My friend suggested that I take her home for the weekend to see how we got along. We got along just as well as he expected. I got a traveling companion. He got rid of a hungry freeloader who was taking up kennel space.

Although she is black with white trim, white paws, and a white chest, I named her “Rusty” after a golden Labrador retriever that my family had when I was a kid.

From the beginning, Rusty showed a desperate des ire to please. I think there were some dark experiences in Rusty's early days that have made this instinct powerful indeed. Which makes me wonder if a young dog, traumatized by feeling hopelessly lost or abandoned, does not spend the rest of its life showing its appreciation for being rescued. Rusty seems to. She tries extremely hard to do everything right.

Rusty came with no apparent house training but picked that up quickly. I credit the motor home with that success. Because it has limited space, I think she sees it as her house, her crate, as the dog books call it. Given a choice, a dog prefers
not to dirty its house. And I give Rusty plenty of choices, all of them just a couple of steps away.

It was time to leave this sedentary existence, time to flee the chaotic traffic that Rusty feared and I hated. We headed into the unknown while it was still dark, not knowing what to expect from each other. The idea of having company on this journey felt especially good. Who knows what Rusty thought of it? For her it was a totally new adventure.

I
wanted an early start on the desert, a geographic mass to be dealt with for all the eastbound traffic out of Los Angeles. This is the first day of summer, the longest day of the year, which means the sun has more time to cook this desert and set heat records.

Rusty and I left Interstate 10 near Palm Springs and climbed north toward the town of Morongo Valley. Covering the high ridges on both sides of Highway 62 are wind farms: hundreds, maybe thousands, of steel towers topped with multi-bladed wind turbines. A faddish tax-shelter gimmick of the 1980s, they are spinning in a strong wind today, presumably generating electricity. As an investment, I have heard that they are a disaster. Quite often, they don't spin at all.

Residents out here are known to tell out-of-towners that the wind turbines are here to blow the smog out of Los Angeles. I suspect the turbines might would be as successful doing that as what they are touted to do.

Highway 62 straightens out, levels, and becomes the Twentynine Palms Highway. It is named for the town on its eastern end, After it passes through Yucca Valley and Joshua Tree. Signs depict the territory well, like Dig Your Own Cactus
—39 Cents, Sunburst Park, and Desert-High this and that. One exception is the Seahorse Saloon, the only one in the desert, I bet. Space is plentiful. The population is sparse. Growth is apparently no problem here, unless they want more of it.

A couple of ninety-degree turns and we are on Amboy Road, rolling through shallow dips in the open desert. Where every side road joins Highway 62 stood rows of mailboxes. Obviously, people live out there somewhere, far off these side roads, but they must be living very close to the ground. Signs of human life in the desert may take many forms: a cluster of trees, the sun reflecting off glass or metal, maybe a string of telephone poles. I saw none of these.

Wheel tracks in the sand and some narrow roads snaking up the sides of the Sheep Hole Mountains tell of people. Otherwise, nothing man-made breaks the landscape. There are no crops, no livestock, not even fences. Living
on
it maybe, but nobody is living
off
this land.

Cresting Sheep Hole Summit at 2,368 feet, we view the downside, looking north. Off in the distance, twenty-four miles, stretch Old Route 66 and the town of Amboy, indistinguishable in the haze.

Dropping to the desert floor, the temperature in the motor home quickly rose to 105 degrees. Rusty let me know that this was something new for her. Her tongue dripping, she hunted for a cool spot on the floor. Too late to turn on the air conditioner. It would not make a dent in this scorched air. So I opened the windows and roof vents and just let the desert blow through the motor home. It was hot, but the superheated air as dry, which made it bearable.

The road passed over the cracked and crusty white bottom of a dry lake. It reminded me of Devil's Golf Course in Death Valley, which is solid salt—jagged, sharp, and hard as steel. Here the salt is being commercially removed, but not this day. No salt is worth mining in this heat.

Just be fore reaching Route 66, now called the National Trails Highway, a crossing gate stopped us at the railroad tracks. Rusty came alive. I discovered that she loves to watch
trains but hates the whistle. This train was long and whistled very little. No doubt, this was the hightight of Rusty's day.

T
urning onto Route 66, the road sign announced Amboy, population twenty, founded in 1858. Clustered in Amboy's only shade, in front of a café, were a couple dozen Harley-Davidson motorcycles. They looked fresh from the showroom. Their owners were sucking water from plastic bottles, packing ice in coolers and mopping their heads where their helmets had been.

One rider, an attractive gal from Minneapol is, told me that they were a few of the 430 Harley owners who were riding from Milwaukee to the Pacific Ocean at Santa Monica on what remains of the original Route 66. Two riders from France air-shipped their “hogs” over here just to make this ride. They spoke of the huge interest in Europe in America's “Mother Road,” calling it the route of the greatest human migration in the twentieth century. I am sure they are right. These Frenchmen knew more about this piece of Americana than I did.

I was looking for Buster. In my travels along Route 66 here in California, old-timers have spoken of Buster often. They said he tells great stories about the thirties and forties, when this historic road through Amboy was a way of life, not
a mere 2,448-mile stretch of cement that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. Buster was here then. Over the last few years, I must have stopped in Amboy a half-dozen times looking for him, but we have never met. Buster owned the café with the much-sought-after shade, where the gas pumps are. Buster built a row of white, boxlike tourist cabins, which later grew into a motel. Sometime after World War II, I guess, he added a tall neon sign and a motel lobby fronted with floor-to-ceiling glass. The best I could tell, he had given up on the motel, except its lobby, where his wife had an art gallery.

Buster's roadside business is all there is to Amboy, if you exclude the eight-to-noon post office across the road and, of course, the busy tracks of the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe Railroad. Otherwise, this is textbook desert, as in
hot, vast, barren.

Glancing toward the motel lobby, I noticed that racks of white T-shirts embossed with Route 66 decals had replaced the oil paintings. And the sign on the café now read Roy's Texaco, Welcome Travelers on Route 66. Something was amiss. Commercializing his heritage was not Buster's style.

The guy behind the counter in the café was a walking display right off the racks in the lobby—shirt, hat, belt buckle, even a Get Your Kicks on Route 66 button. He broke the news. “They sold out and moved to Twentynine Palms.”

As I turned to leave, he added, “Yeah, Buster is history.”

I wanted to yell something about the volumes of history that left with him. But I knew the human billboard behind the counter would not, probably could not, comprehend it.

Rusty hopped inside the motor home. I told her we had probably seen the last of Amboy. She wagged her tail in agreement.

I thought that someday I might stop in Twentynine Palms and look up Buster. But how would I do that? I didn't even know his last name.

H
eaded east on the great “Migrant Way,” sparks of sun shot from polished chrome and steel as we met a continuing parade of oncoming motorcycles. The rumble that rolls with a group of Harleys is probably as well rooted and traditionally American as this road.

Route 66 was busy well beyond the Depression years, the years of the “greatest human migration,” as the Frenchmen called it. In the 1930s, this road was filled with people bound for California, escaping layoffs in the Midwest and dust storms on the Great Plains. Later, after World War II, touring America via Route 66 became a national pastime. Neon lights, billboards, and mechanical cowboys twirling lariats enticed tourists to the latest innovation of American's inn keepers: the motor court. Roadside vendors vied for the traveling trade with snake pits, live buffaloes, and Indian dances. And a bottle of Coke came out of machines for a nickel.

At Essex, a sign on the edge of town set the population at 100. Jack Howard shook his head. “I think it's more like 50 people - maybe 60 on the holidays.”

Jack sat in the tiny stone post office, which had just enough floor space for a table and his chair. I hunched over
{I'm not tall} so I could see Jack and talk to him through the thin bars at the stamp window.

“You must work alone.”

“Yep, you bet I do. Couldn't do it any other way. Been postmaster here since 1967.”

“Got any Elvis stamps?”

He laughed. “Strange that you should ask. I remember selling my last sheet of those to a tourist from Holland.”

Jack got up, walked outside, and lit a cigarette. “You can't smoke any more in a federal building. Did ya know that? But I don't mind. It's nice to get out.”

He looked up and down the road. Nothing moved.

“Hmm,” Jack grunted and drew on his cigarette. “The old road is getting busier. People over the mountain have discovered it's a quick way to get to Laughlin and the river. This post office, the diner, and the garage next door, which shut down years ago, were built in 1932 by a guy from Phoenix. He broke down here and decided it was a good place to start a business fixing cars.

“My wife was born here. She remembers stories about the Okies coming through in the thirties. What wasn't in their car was strapped to the sides, things like water bags and a mattress or two. She's the schoolteacher here. One room, one teacher, all grades through junior high.”

Jack and I walked over to an Indian couple whose car had broken down. Luckily, they were parked in the shade, under the canopy of the deserted garage. Jack stayed and talked. I returned to my motor home.

I opened a Pepsi. Rusty and I walked across the road and into the desert a ways. The desert, more than any other terrain, shows its age, the passage of time. Vegetation does not cover the eons of erosion by wind and storm. Everywhere is rock, the world's oldest thing, and tawny grit that was once rock. Even desert creatures come from a time older than their woodland cousins. In response to this arduous existence, many have retained their prehistoric coverings of lapped scales.

We returned to find, the post office closed. Nobody was around. If this stretch of Old Route 66 was getting busier, as Jack said, there certainly was no sign of it today.

I gave Rusty her dinner and got back on the road. The low sun turned Cast le Dome behind me into a silhouette. Ahead lay Interstate 40 and Arizona. Way out there, on the tracks of the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe, were the headlights of a freight train coming from Needles. I thought about Fred Myers, the railroad brakeman I met there. Was he on that train? And how are the friends of the Harvey House in Needles?

Fond memories of people I meet along this journey create a hollow that grows as this nomadic life ages. I think of them and often wonder how their lives are going. Though my time with them is short, I remember it well. It's like waving to a conductor passing in a caboose. Twenty seconds of coming together. Then, in an instant, it's over. Again I am alone, watching the train disappear to nothing.

Rusty will bring some camaraderie and maybe a fresh outlook to this lonely lifestyle. I can use it.