Thursday, September 24, 2009

Day 13: Kingman, Arizona to Barstow, California

22 September. Barstow, California. 10:15 pm.

Executive summary: 7am start, 7pm finish. 360 miles. Kingman - Lake Havasu - Topock - Kingman - Oatman - Topock - Needles - Goofs - Essex - Cadiz Summit - Amboy - Ludlow - Newberry Springs - Barstow.

I almost hesitate to post this day because a lot of it will sound negative, and I haven’t yet figured out how to gloss over the disappointments while remaining honest about what went on – but based on the feedback received so far, people have appreciated our "keeping it real" by including the lows as well as the highs. And as every good traveler knows, any adventure includes plenty of both – so here goes. Besides, everyone knows that on the TV reality shows, the parts where they all get mad at each other are the most entertaining for everyone else, so maybe this will be more amusing for readers than it was for us living through it in person. If so, you can break out the popcorn, sit back, and enjoy!

Wanting to see Oatman, take in a couple of shows there (which we believed were at 12, 1:30, and possibly 3pm – meaning that we could see the 12 and 1:30, with time between to explore the town and sit down for a leisurely lunch), but still to try to make Barstow for the night, we had decided to rise early, drive on ahead to drop off Tom’s car (he didn’t want to drive it on the road to Oatman) at Topock and the camper at Lake Havasu City (it would be dangerous on that road, and which we wouldn’t need again until Friday). The plan was for Mom and Tom to drive his car directly to Topock, where they could park it and have a leisurely breakfast at the marina while Dad, Don, and I took the camper to June and Brian’s place down in Lake Havasu City. Then we would swing over to Topock to pick up Mom and Tom and, all in the truck, return to Kingman, traverse the infamous Oatman Highway, hopefully in time to experience Oatman’s burros, wild-west-style main street, see its shows, explore the town in between, and be on our way west by 2pm.

I reflected that by leaving the camper behind, with the consequent decisions needing to be made about what to leave and what to take with us, we were granted a small glimpse into a very real aspect of early pioneers’ passages westward across the continent. We all have read books and seen movies in which the characters become so beaten-down and so overcome by unforeseen circumstances that they are forced to make difficult decisions, choosing which priceless possessions to leave behind along the dusty wagon trail and which few things to take along, whether in a covered wagon, by horseback, or on their own backs. Of course, our choices were not so weighty, knowing that we’ll be back in a couple of days – but the very fact of making them helped to illustrate in some small way what it must have been like for those early pioneers, who knew that they never would return and were leaving their things behind forever. In the end, things are only things – but out there in the desert, making choices to leave them behind likely became tragic and nearly unbearable at times.

Our logistical planning paid off: our estimated times were almost right-on, and we reached Oatman actually ahead of schedule (the Oatman Highway itself proved far less treacherous than I had believed, and the Goldroad gold mining town was inhospitable, with no hint of the Gold Road Mine Tours about which I had read). Reaching Oatman with time to spare before the first of the 2 shows we were trying to catch, I heaved a private sigh of relief, immensely glad to be completely done meeting schedules and deadlines for the rest of this trip, and with only 90 minutes of time to kill between the two little shows we had come to see, allowing more than enough time to see the little town. The best information I had been able to obtain beforehand turned out to be dead-on, as confirmed by the first person I asked upon alighting in town. We made the first show (a gunfight on main street), and we managed to find something to do for 87 of the 90 minutes we needed to pass until the second before we would have been out of there and happily on our way... but suddenly Tom announced, "We’ve gotta go!" The rest of the group agreed, and off we went. Yes, having spent no less than 6 hours and 27 minutes successfully executing our Oatman plan, we abandoned it 180 seconds short of completion.

Oatman was the kind of place that is like hell on earth for someone like me, composed entirely of shop after kitschy shop crammed to the hilt with kitschy tourist souvenirs: keychains, shot glasses, mugs, hats, scarves, rugs, blankets, wind chimes, aprons, cookbooks, you-name-it... and, of course, T-shirts by the hundreds. Each side of the little main street contained about a dozen of these shops, interspersed only by a couple of ice cream shops and a hotel and restaurant (where we killed most of the time we needed to expend between the 2 little shows). I was a good sport about it, obligingly peeking into all the little shops, and even making a couple of purchases, all with a good attitude. But when it came to seeing the one thing that I (and, I had thought, the rest of the group) actually wanted to see – animals – that favor was not returned.

One might ask why anyone would make the effort to traverse the treacherous road to get there for the sake of a bunch of souvenir shops that sell the same things you could buy anywhere. Well, it’s to see the donkeys! Wild burros descended from a herd brought by long-ago prospectors roam the area and its streets, infamous for eating out of tourists’ hands (we had come prepared with carrots).

Sadly, we didn’t get to see any burros, hurrying out of town literally 3 minutes before the canned performance utilizing them was to begin. This begs the question of why we had expended so much time and effort to get there in the first place – as well as when exactly the plan evaporated, and why 3 minutes one way or the other was so earth-shatteringly important that we had to miss what we had come to see (and what at least one of us desperately wanted to see, having made so much effort and already invested so much time...). I would have been perfectly fine with skipping Oatman entirely, had I known we weren’t going to see any donkeys or would wind up wasting 7 hours getting there and back, for the sake of about 2 minutes of entertainment that we did get to see. Or, I would have been fine with simply making it a 15-minute photo op stop; no problem. But to not only make the effort to get there, but then to deliberately kill time for almost an hour and a half, only to leave immediately before the performance we had been waiting all that time to see... that made no sense to me.

I’m still scratching my head as to why exactly 3 minutes (or 5, or even – gasp! – 15, if the second show, as we believed, was more involved than the first) suddenly were so important, but apparently they were, so we all left without seeing any donkeys – or any wildlife at all – the only animal we saw (besides some roadrunners) was a lonely black and white cat on the porch outside one of the souvenir shops.

So I wound up frustrated and downright angry. It’s not easy being the group tour guide, narrator, navigator, travel agent, and waiter... but all those jobs become even harder when you have to fight with people at every turn! It’s not about having my own way, or wanting to follow some agenda, or anything except wanting to be rational. I had no set schedule in mind when we began – in fact, I was excited about not having to live by a fixed itinerary, with a smaller group that would allow flexibility. As the trip has progressed, we have thrown out a number of ideas and adapted as we went. Last week in Tulsa they were wanting us to be only as far as Lake Havasu – still westbound – next Sunday! (Leaving me all the more perplexed as to why time suddenly was so critical that we couldn’t linger 3 minutes in Oatman as planned.) One of my early suggestions, upon realizing that time in Oatman was something the group wanted to do, was to devote a full day between Kingman and Needles, which would have facilitated an easy day, so that people wouldn’t feel rushed, and would have permitted us to begin the desert crossing bright and early the next morning, before the sun got going full-bore. Another suggestion had been spending a night in Flagstaff in order to reach Kingman earlier in the day, permitting an afternoon visit to Oatman and an overnight in Needles, with the same unhurried result. We adopted the schedule we did because it was what the group wanted... So if Tom (or anyone else) wanted to reach Barstow by a certain time, or not to be driving across the desert in the afternoon, there had been plenty of opportunities to raise those concerns. Even on arriving in Oatman, we could have agreed to make it a quick photo op stop, rather than to wait around for 2 hours (or even an hour), if anyone was in a big hurry to get someplace else on a deadline. But to go to all that trouble, and to deliberately kill time for almost an hour and a half, only to decide literally at the last minute that we weren’t going to wait the last 3 minutes... that was inconceivable.

Even more than wasting time (sitting around for an hour and a half killing time is not my cup of tea), I can’t stand rushing away from something interesting – which is exactly what we did, after killing time doing something uninteresting by lingering in a dark hotel listening to some guy sing Karaoke Elvis songs while we killed time having lunch. I was mildly surprised when the uncles decided to move from the shady hotel/restaurant adjacent to the location of the next show in favor of sitting in the truck, but figured they wanted its stronger AC. I preferred to remain where we were for the remaining few minutes, curious to see the honeymoon hideaway of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard.

We were a silent group heading west out of town, turning south toward Topock across a sobering desert section of old Route 66 that has not changed much (other than being paved) since the Dust Bowl days. We could understand why the Joads walked out into the Colorado River shallows and just stood there after driving this stretch. It is said that "the road from Oatman to Topock can be as tough as any road ever gets." It was bad enough for us today – mostly miserable because of the 3 minutes we didn’t stay to see the animals – and I’m sure that doesn’t begin to compare with what it must have felt like in a covered wagon or even some of the old automobiles!

Emerging from the Oatman Highway at Topock, Don – ever the peacemaker – showed me around the Topock Gorge Marina, a lovely place with shaded tables overlooking the water where we could happily have lunched if we hadn’t been waiting in Oatman for the 2nd show (or if anyone had shared the urgent need to leave prior to sitting around there for an extra few hours). Although all of them had joined in the decision to rush away just before the show with the animals began (the human characters were already lining up on Oatman’s main street as we drove through on our way out), I was mostly irritated with Tom, who had seemed to be the one most hell-bent on hurrying off into the desert 3 minutes ahead of schedule, so I dared not ride with him, knowing it was likely that I would say something expressing my feelings about what I felt was an irrational decision. So I rode with Mom and Dad in the truck from there on, leaving poor Uncle Don to suffer in the air-condition-less Skyliner. I felt bad about that, but felt like I might have killed Tom if I rode with him. (It was similar to the way I had felt a few days earlier, after Mom insisted on our bypassing lunch at the U-Drop Inn in Shamrock – which Tom, of all people, could understand, since he had shared similar thoughts that day, when I rode with him and we voiced our mutual frustration in been rushed away from the kind of Route 66 experience we were there to have, for no logical reason – but now he was the one spearheading efforts to do exactly that.) In any event, I needed some time to simmer down before I could be cordial again with him, so Mom and Dad had to listen to me vent. Mom just kept reminding me, "We’re old," and "We don’t think as fast as you do," but that was cold comfort in the face of my repeated reminders that they could – and should, especially if unable to make responsible decisions themselves – just trust me when I try to offer guidance. Otherwise, don’t ask for my help in the first place – or be up-front about being unwilling to participate in the stated group goal, which here I thought had been to experience Route 66 as much as possible.

Don – who, like me, I sensed still was keen to see the Route 66 sights for which we had embarked on this trip in the first place – still wanted to see what we could along the way, but after Tom’s little tantrum in insisting on rushing off from Oatman, I honestly felt like we dared not dally anywhere. After all, if we couldn’t spare 3 minutes in Oatman – after already devoting 7 hours to doing so – then how could we justify any stop, anywhere? I couldn’t understand (and I still can’t) what the big rush was, so I was exasperated trying to guess at what, if any, delays, would be acceptable after that little stunt. I was fed up with having to fight tooth-and-nail to see anything, and about ready to get out a book to read and let them all figure it out the rest of the way on their own (since apparently my suggestions to this point were so miserable that nobody could stand to endure an extra 3 whole minutes of it), but Don’s gentle requests for me to continue prevailed, so I sulkily resumed trying to guide us along as best I could.

Following the National Trails road east from Park Moabi Road, we curved along the foot of a bluff marking the edge of the Colorado River, doubling back under the railroad and I-40 to an ancient stone billboard welcoming us to Historic 66, near the first and last automobile bridges over the Colorado River, including the graceful Old Trails Arch Bridge, built in 1916 for auto traffic but now supporting a gas pipeline, seen in the movie The Grapes of Wrath.

Approaching Needles, we were greeted by its official Welcome Wagon, a reconstructed freight wagon bearing the town name. West of Needles, I40 charges boldly up and over the south pass of the Sacramento Mountains. I did suggest that if Tom was in a hurry, he could just take the interstate directly to Barstow where we could catch up with him later, thinking that might be the best solution for everyone: that way he could get to Barstow without having to see or do anything along the old road, while the rest of us could enjoy a more leisurely drive along it without having to feel rushed. But he wound up deciding to follow us after all, and even stopped later for ice cream (leaving me all the more exasperated, since that obviously took far more than the 3 minutes we couldn’t spare back at Oatman... I was furious – obviously – I’m still fuming), all confirming why I generally prefer to travel alone.

Then again, perhaps there was something amazing and remarkable to see at the Ludlow, California Dairy Queen. I wouldn’t know, since I didn’t go there – as discussed in some detail beginning back in Lebanon, Missouri, as a general rule I do my level best not to eat at fast-food chains, but to patronize unique local businesses, and I certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to go to a Dairy Queen – particularly when there’s a Route 66 business that’s been there for more than half a century that’s right on the way. But that’s just me.

Departing I-40, we opted for the early road, which followed the railroad over an easy-driving, little-trafficked, no-grade curve above the mountains. Unlike the winding, steep road to Oatman, which seemed deliberately to follow the most difficult route possible, this one made perfect sense as the path of least resistence to early travelers.

In Goffs we stopped to see a restored 1914-era schoolhouse that also served as a community center, surrounded by displays of mining machinery, old vehicles, and windmills. A crusty desert town, Goffs is a survivor in its own right – one of those places that apparently wouldn’t know how to give up. Once, because it is usually at least 15 degrees cooler than nearby Needles, Goffs was a regular little summer resort. Now, despite double bypass surgery and air conditioning everywhere on the desert, the little town still carries on somehow.

Then ensued a long, hot afternoon crossing the desert – although we realized how easy we have it today (even in the un-air-conditioned Skyliner), when we stopped at a roadside pullout to read a placard providing some insight into what early travelers endured. The pullout was in a spot from which we could see for miles in every direction, nothing but sun-scorched earth. The site marked the previous location of a roadside rest area consisting of four picnic tables, with the concrete anchors still visible. The explanation noted that early travelers took days to cross this section of the desert. Our casual crossing of just a few hours paled by comparison.

This was the area where 50 years ago, the desert meant not death but a chance at life. During WWII, Hitler’s Desert Fox, Erwin Rommel, was loose with his Panzer Corps racing almost unopposed across North Africa toward an unlimited supply of oil needed by the Nazi war machine. If America couldn’t support the beleaguered British there soon, the war would most certainly have been lost. However, General George S. Patton, reared in this part of California, knew that the Mojave was not only similar to North Africa, but could be worse. So he pressed every tank, truck, motorcycle, and reconnaissance aircraft he could find into service as part of his Desert Training Center. Over 2 million men were trained to survive in the 10,000 square miles of desert surrounding us. In the end, the Great Mojave did its job, and Patton and his Second Corps did theirs, sweeping through North Africa as if they knew their way around, with no surprises that their own desert hadn’t already shown them.

Passing Essex, we paused to see a public well that once provided "Free water!" to a thirsty US 66, now dry but still picturesque even – or particularly – in its abandoned state. A few miles west of there began a public art corridor of sorts, where hundreds of passing travelers had written their names with rocks, bottles, and other miscellany, on a dirt berm bordering the highway. We observed these but opted not to stop to add our own highway epitaph. Abandoned buildings, old garages, stations, cabins, cafés, and other shops whose only remnants are low walls, foundations, and cinder-block ruins and graffiti marked the former sites of Danby, Cadiz Summit, and on down the hill, Chambless and East Amboy, with its well-preserved ruins of the Roadrunner’s Retreat Café and Station, sporting an immense neon sign depicting a roadrunner. Apparently Dodge filmed a commercial there in 1988. Further along we came to the Route 66 place said to hold the record for appearances in commercials, videos, and movies, Roy’s Café and Motel in Amboy, begun by Buster Burris in 1938 and billed as "the crustiest, dustiest gas stop on all of Route 66." Tom topped off his tank there, and I treated us all to Route 66 Root Beers before continuing. A large coyote casually sauntered across the highway in front of us before we crossed the railroad tracks.

A little further along, Mom, Dad, and I pulled over to check out Amboy Crater, a National Landmark whose lava flow crossed Route 66 a bit west. We drove in to the site, where Dad and I were disappointed after walking a 100-meter concrete walkway to find... nothing at the end. The place looked newly-developed, so perhaps they’re still in the process of erecting signage. There was a marker near the drive that explained that the crater is the result of 6 distinct periods of eruptions, starting 6000 years ago, with the last as recently as 500 years ago. We would have loved to have hiked across the lava field over to the crater rim, but not in that heat.

We watched for the ruins of Bagdad (inspiration for the film Bagdad Café) between Amboy and Siberia, but never saw the crumbling foundations supposed to be there somewhere. I haven’t yet seen the film, but apparently it presents a tale of human relationships and what kind of endurance and personal responsibility it takes to transform misgivings and self-pity into trust and love, with Old Route 66 offering a way in and a way out, leaving everyone free to choose either direction, with the desert burning away everything else. Sounds interesting; I’ll have to watch it sometime with this day, and this stretch of highway, in mind.

Instead, we proceeded northwest toward Ludlow for a scheduled ice cream treat stop at the Ludlow Café and Coffee Shop, with its genuine display of old mining carts out front and interesting architecture – we could check out a view from inside through angled stained glass windows while enjoying our dishes of ice cream, banana cream pie, and coffee for Dad. Tom and Don opted for a Dairy Queen across the street.

From there we played some vehicle leapfrog (we spotted the Skyliner crossing an overpass above us after the Dairy Queen stop, as we hurried to catch up from the Ludlow Café) as we continued to Newberry Springs, which retains a relic of the former Whiting Brothers Gas Station chain and the current Bagdad Café, a nondescript wooden A-frame structure preserved complete with pumps behind a fence. Next up was Dagget, described as "an aging bridesmaid among railroad towns." It was once a major transshipment point for the borax trade from Calico to the north, apparently featured in reruns of Ronald Reagan hosting Death Valley Days. Local developers at one point learned that the Santa Fe Railway planned a major switching complex there, and they drove the price of land up – but they did so to such an extent that the complex wound up being built at another location instead, at a site given the middle name of the railroad’s president, William Barstow Strong. Now Daggett holds littlel more than a homey general store and the Stone Hotel.

For our own accommodations, we had opted for Barstow’s Route 66 Motel, feeling that appropriate on this, our last night together on the Mother Road. Like so many of the mom-and-pop motels along Route 66, it sported a great neon sign, along with a courtyard display of old cars. Our room in a 1920s-era stucco cabin, was simple and Spartan (not even a phone), but relatively clean and quiet (ironic – despite Barstow owing its very existence to the railroads, with the very location of downtown having been dictated by the Santa Fe in 1925, when the whole place had to be moved to enable the railroad yards to be expanded – this was one place where we did not have trains roaring right past us all night long).

As I mentioned, it had been a difficult, trying day for all of us. Still frustrated with wasting several hours of time for no apparent reason and being rushed around for the express purpose of not seeing what we had come to see, I toyed with the thought of just hopping on a plane back from Barstow. (Earlier in the trip, I might have done so, unwilling to throw time down the drain if only to be wasted going out of our way not to see things – I would rather take my time – yes, even 3 extra minutes here and there – and see what I can, when I have the opportunity; the whole carpe diem concept.) Though teasingly dubbed the "travel Nazi," I was not the one pushing us hard to meet some deadline (much less a secret one, as-yet undisclosed), and I don’t find that an enjoyable way to travel – particularly when doing so forced us to miss out on something we had made such a tremendous effort to see and in which we already had invested so much time. But at this point we had only one day left. We would make Santa Monica tomorrow, and then everyone would be free to rush home to their everyday lives and never have to linger in the desert for a single extra moment to see burros or drink in the experience of someplace new and different.

So... I guess that "3 more minutes" might become a meaningful mantra, similar to the "We were on a break!" recited so often and with such uncomprehending irritation by Ross on the TV show Friends.

When I related the tale later, Bernie’s first question was, "Well, why couldn’t you have just found someplace in the shade for them to sit and wait?" Of course, this made me wail all the more, since that was exactly what I had done, enduring an hour of listening to that aging, Elvis-impersonating karaoke-singing guy inside the restaurant at the Oatman Hotel while eating overpriced mediocre food biding our time... but they then insisted on returning to the blazing sun during the final 15 minutes of our wait. The next comment was that I should have just refused to get in the truck to leave. Tom (and the rest of them) might have been antsy for 3 minutes – but we would have been able to see what we had come for.

Later, when cooler, more rational heads prevailed, Dad also mused that he wished I had just refused to leave Oatman. But that’s the problem – that’s not the way I roll – I would never behave that way, insisting on having my own way regardless of what others might want (and even when my position is, as it was here, supported by reasoned, rational thinking). In hindsight, it would have been better to have behaved that way at least on this occasion (and probably back in Shamrock, Texas – and over in Skagen, Denmark in 2006, and way back on the Great Barrier Reef in 2004)... but I just can’t ever bring myself to run roughshod over others’ feelings. I always wind up putting others first – even when they’re being irrational, and even when it forces me (and sometimes others who are cutting off their nose to spite their face) to make sacrifices – so I’m the one who winds up having to be the bigger person, bite the bullet, and just roll with it. For such people it doesn’t seem to matter that those "once-in-a-lifetime" chances don’t come again, and for those of us to whom it does matter, we are left with the choice of leaving those people behind, or giving up on opportunities because of them, if we choose to keep them in our lives. I’ve always chosen the people over the experiences, but days like today test my patience! Fortunately I’m resilient, and try simply to find the lining in any cloud.

Finding that silver lining in this context, I guess this day helped prove the point that, as they do in real life, the road and the desert tend to strip away all but the bare essentials. Hot, tired, and weary from the road, people begin to show their true grit, with nothing left but character. Some remain determined to accomplish what they have set out to do, while others feel so overwhelmed that they want only to give up and "end it all," as noted in the quoted passage. Our experiences of this day seemed to underscore that point, and our various personalities bore it out to a person: some people wind up being ready to cut and run, succumbing to panic in a moment of heated, hopeless exasperation to such an extent that reason is lost; some are exasperated by that willingness to just give up and go, resilient and still focused on the goal, whatever it might be (that was me – I suppose that in the days of the wild west, I might have been the sheriff who simply shot dead the townsperson who had gone mad with the desert heat and was causing a panic among everyone else and so endangering the town); many fall into the herd mentality, willing to just go along with the path of least resistance offering momentary relief from the desert heat without really thinking through the long-term consequences; and some remain reflective, quiet, persistent, declining to engage in any heated discussions but listening carefully and serving as ambassadors to all in trying to smooth things over and find common ground to continue (like a one-man judge and jury whose advice everyone hears and obeys – that was Don). So in their own way, the road and the desert laid bare our own truest tendencies during our own difficult crossing, teaching us many lessons along the way.

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