It was our anniversary, so we decided to go to Joshua Tree to celebrate. My parents don’t live far, maybe 45 minutes from the park’s north entrance, so we stayed with them in La Quinta, just outside of Coachella, with the sounds of the Stagecoach festival blaring in the distance, before driving up in the morning, past the giant quixote windmills and up into the high desert.
I first heard about Joshua Tree from an old Santa Cruz friend when I was 19 years old. He had stayed there on an extended rock-climbing trip and met an array of societal dropouts and mystics that had made the park into a kind of transient home. He told me a story about how he took ayahuasca on top of a boulder in the middle of the night and experienced a vision of his dying mother while the wind buzzed around him like a hovering insect swarm.
So the park has always vibrated in my mind as spiritually profound. It’s full of strange trees named after biblical prophets that hardly grow anywhere else, and it’s the opposite of the lush green landscape where I grew up traipsing over wet forest floors. Two decades ago while I was planning a hitchhiking trip after another failed attempt at a college degree, I decided to make one of my last stops there.
The hitchhiking trip was not as disastrous as it could have been. I made it from New Orleans to Houston, which is not very far in terms of the whole country, but after that I had had enough of relying on the kindness of strangers. I took a train the rest of the way to Palm Springs, which was an experience itself, and watched the southwest landscape with a bright firecracker orange and red sky hovering over a part of the planet I had never seen before.
I found myself in Palm Springs, near the south end of the city at the bus station. 19 years old, rolling my own cigarettes, dirty and needing a haircut. I wanted to experience a world partially captured in the books I’d been reading, Dharma Bums, Into the Wild, that had already faded considerably into nonexistence.
I found a guy, probably in his late twenties, walking out of a Burger King that looked like the outdoorsy type. He had long black hair, an aquiline nose, and thin glasses. When I asked him if he was headed north to the park, he looked me up and down for a moment, considered it, and shrugged his shoulders. It’s been a long time since I’ve been the type of personality that would pick up a hitchhiker, but I recognize the tendency still. It’s a type of “aw fuckit how bad could it be?” mentality that I’ve long since lost.
I asked him about snakes as he drove into the night up the road to the desert community of Yucca Valley. “Well……watch out for ‘em,” he said, “lotta people are kind of at odds with them. Not me. I know how to respect the snakes. That’s what they are after, respect.”
He dropped me off at a motel as I was contemplating the meaning of respect in human and snake relations. It was two in the morning and the stars were bright and cast over the sky like glimmering alloy, cold and high.
The lady said it would be 80 dollars for a room and that I would have to be out by 10:00 A.M. so that they could turn it over for a new guest. I only had 60 dollars left, so I walked back out to the desert and slept under the stars, thinking about snakes and scorpions that might burrow next to me in my sleeping bag for warmth.
I looked for that motel last weekend as we drove down the main road that heads east towards the north park entrance, but it must have been torn down a long time ago. My wife and I walked around the Joshua Tree groves, took pictures and videos, and walked to heart rock where we asked a nice couple to take a picture of us. Joshua Tree still had an electric feeling for me, just the same as when I was 19 and first finding my way there, no cell phone and a backpack tugging on my shoulders. Time is strange and slowly plodding, but when you stand under a 900-year-old Joshua tree, and look up into its outstretched branches lifted in praise, it might pause momentarily.
We drove up the north entrance of the park, down the winding road and to more Joshua groves to sit and bask underneath them. I recalled a rock climber, probably in his thirties, thin and successful swooping me up from the side of the road and taking me all the way into the guts of the park. He was playing Beck's new album “Sea Change” which I had never heard before. (Also, on that hitchhiking trip someone played me 50 Cents’ in Da Club for the first time for me, and it was a transcendent experience I will never forget.) Music recommendations are a whole new thing when you are just hopping into a stranger’s car.
I only stayed in Joshua tree a couple of days on that first visit. I was cold, scared, and broke. The cost of a shower, 5$ at the old climbing store, was an exorbitant luxury I could not afford back then. I’m too brittle to hitchhike now. Am I glad I did it? I’m not sure about that either. So much of the culture of America is chasing a type of feeling that existed just before you were able to be cognizant of it. New York in the 70s was the place to be, and now much of the city survives off that reverberant mythos that is still plastered over everything. Hitchhiking through the American west is another such thing. You can search for the “west” and the spirit of adventure you read about in a book, and you’ll probably never find it unless you admit to yourself that it might not be what you think it is.
As I was writing in my journal, outside on a picnic table in front of the yurt my wife and I rented, memories kept coming to me that I hadn’t thought of in decades. That is a facet of getting older that I’ve taken in with some melancholy—the waves of memories that are instigated by the senses, the smell of dry dust, the chewing sound that the particular sand makes when you walk over it in your boots. I wrote down as much as I could, trying to get it all out in tiny, scrawled paragraphs, when I noticed a glimmer in the corner of my eye and turned and noticed a baby scorpion scuttling over the picnic table towards me. I squealed, (I believe that is the most technical term for it) and ran back over to the fire where my wife was. She insisted on coming back over to see the poisonous creature but all we found was a stick bug that ignored us when we went back over. That night we heard coyotes yipping in the distance, turtle doves and a four on the floor beats from a party a few miles away.
I once had a young man call me and ask for advice. He asked if it was better to travel now, when he was in his early twenties, or wait until he was more established and had more money to do the things he wanted and tour different countries more comfortably. I emphatically told him he should not wait, that the world changes in ways so massive and unpredictable that the places you’ll go in your twenties will be totally different in your forties. If I were to go back to China or Mongolia now, I’m sure that they will have shifted in ways that have made them unrecognizable. Walking in the Joshua Tree desert, near the drooping trees and listening to the squelching sound of my feet on the rough sand, that concept felt less real. The desert had hardly changed at all. Sure, now if I was desperate, I could have called an Uber to take me back to Palm Springs with a credit card instead of accepting a ride from that drunk guy headed to the casino back then. I can also now buy a three hundred dollar, wide-brimmed influencer hat at a boutique shop on the Joshua Tree strip if I want one, but the fundamental aspects of landscape have remained the same.
My skin was on fire after two days in the desert, and we decided to head back mid-day to avoid the worst traffic.
Comfortably swaddled in my air-conditioned Subaru, we drove out the main road back to the city and I tried to recognize the little strip of gravel where I’d held up a cardboard sign that said “Palm Springs Please!” that I’d scribbled in a sharpie 22 years ago, while I waited for someone brave enough to pick me up—but I couldn’t place it. I still haven’t seen a rattlesnake in the wild, but now I can check a baby scorpion off my list.
Maybe next time.
We turned west and drove towards Los Angeles.
Extra things: I drew a comic page a day for a month. I’m working on a zine for it but you can check them out on my instagram highlights @your_uncle_eric