dokodemo

Turns out they were a French-Canadian couple from Montreal, en route to Baja California. They wanted to reach the southermost tip. They had, in tow, a 1200cc Honda touring motorcycle to help complete this task.

The man pointed to the border of the recreation fee area and said "do what I do, stop by the line". I pulled up near them on a somewhat-packed sand.

I never got their names, but they were very friendly. The man brews his own wine at home and offered me tastes of some. It was very good, though balmy weather and a gorgeous sunset behind the dunes didn't hurt. His wife was friendly and warm, but she abruptly disappeared when he started making some sexist jokes about female drivers. She told me, through the open window of her RV, that "Canada has many male chauv... chau... showmen!" The window then slammed shut, and she prepared dinner while I was schooled in the ways of winemaking, Canadian civil electricity systems, and the petropolitics now being played by the United States, while the rest of the world watches, in total understanding, from their sufficiently distant persceptives. I was the choir being preached to as he launched into tirades about high gas prices, lack of efficiency in America's public transportation, horrible over-consumption and lack of recycling, health care crisises, Celine Deon playing live in Vegas, and Niagra Falls. It was all pretty good, and it gave me a lot to think about as I went to sleep around 8pm (would have been 7pm in Arizona, four miles away).

From the dunes, I drove around the Saltan Sea, largest lake in California. Its fairly surreal, it looks like an ocean out in the middle of ... nothing. Like the place where the time machine crashes in Planet of the Apes.

Lots of dates available in Indio, the kind that grow on palm trees, not the kind that you get at a truckstop for $50.

Entering the Joshua Tree National Park, I was stunned by the ocotillo plants, which look like coral to me. I had never seen them before. Eventually I started to see actual Joshua Trees, and then a forest of cholo cactus.

Joshua Tree is one of those places which at a glance seems so dead and still, but as soon as you stop, you notice stern little plants growing right out of rocks, plenty of lizards and tarantulas patrolling the ground, hawks and ravens circling overhead. Its actually teeming. I was hoping to see a desert tortoise but was not so lucky.

From the top of a small mountain, it was apparant how much smog had drifted in from Los Angeles, 200 miles to the west. The view of Palm Springs and Indio was quite hazy.

The rock formations in Joshua Tree are astonishing. Enormous piles of boulders just rising up from the dust of the Mojave Desert. I especially liked the spherical rock suspended in a gap. Some of them almost look like Picasso works, with geometric shapes carefully arranged. It was easy to kill a lot of time looking at the shapes of the rocks and imagining what they looked like (just like finding shapes in clouds). Apparantly I'm not alone in this as there are several features with names like "Skull Rock", "Hall of Horrors", and so forth.

At one point, a coyote trotted up to my van and looked at me longingly. I've seen several coyotes all around the country, and they are usually quite shy and quickly disappear into the bush. My previous favorite was one which had a rabbit in its mouth, but this time I got such a good view that I was really blown away. I was concerned at first that this guy was sick, since he was so slow and tame, but I suppose he is just acclimated to people, probably through feeding.

The sunset and subsequent sunrise were astonishing. I popped awake at 5am as a burrow owl would not stop its cooing. I took time to walk all around the area and again try in vein to photograph the morning colors. Like Colossal Cave, one has to be very careful not to bump into anything at Joshua Tree... its all covered with spikes and teeth.

This part of the trip is starting to be colored by a little sadness as I am in my home time zone and heading directly closer to home. The vision of the cold northern pacific waters are strong in my mind, where they have felt so far away for so long. I'm looking forward to the drive up the coast, but I am not looking forward to the increasing melancholy as urban workaday reality arrives. Right now is a sort of experiment in figuring out mental techniques for keeping these issues at bay for as long as possible while they grow physically closer and closer.