Wednesday, August 5, 2009, Los Angeles, CA

Miles: 498

I hadn’t even finished my Nalgene of lukewarm cowboy coffee and Whisper was already shooting ground squirrels. He got the first one, on the first try, and managed to scare off the rest. Whisper is some kind of groundskeeper on the little piece of private property right beneath Lake Isabella Dam, sandwiched between the Kern River and a ranger station where we were camping. He wears a filthy, over-sized T-shirt from a from a bait and tackle store in Gardena and undersized black shorts that are normally hidden by the way that shirt overhangs his impressive belly. He uses a big neck brace but doesn’t let it get in the way of hoeing the garden or even, well, shooting squirrels. He has the same accent as my grandmother and talks too much about Vietnam.

“Where are you from, Whisper?” I asked him.

“From the cold reaches of Pennsylvania.”

“Oh? Where are the cold reaches of Pennsylvania?”(So I know what to avoid, of course.)

“Well there are two.” Pause. “If you cut the state into six equal squares the long way, the first is a big anthracite deposit in the top middle square. That’s where I’m from. The second is down in the…”

Oh. Coal regions. He kept going and I stopped listening.

After six months of very little excitement, a weekend of rafting can be a bit much. With my bruised back, scraped belly, squished foot, and sun burnt knees, I decided Monday morning was clearly for reading by the river while Aaron and the other truly hardy river rats went back for more. After lunch I set off for Los Angeles.

I’d determined to head over the mountains and through the desert as best as I could. I had no plans until dinner time, all my friends were at work, and I’ve driven through the Central Valley once or twice before. I thought I’d seen a road shooting due south over the mountains from Lake Isabella, and set off to find it. After the town of Bodfish I ended up on a one-and-a-half lane road, without even a yellow stripe, that quickly hair-pinned out of the canyon. I didn’t see any signs and, oddly, my schmancy new GPS didn’t seem to know there was a road here. The route, which I now know to be Bodfish Caliente Road, came down into another valley and I couldn’t imagine a more perfect Old West picture. Hemmed in by steep scrubby dark brown canyon walls leading into lighter-shaded rocky mountain sides a few ranches hugged the shady arboreal margin between the road and a small creek.::fuzzpic-left(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_7845.jpg”,”Imagining myself an intrepid explorer.”)::

I got further and further away from any roads known to the GPS. Disappointment in technology mixed with a certain feeling of adventurousness. What if the road just ends at the locked gate of some dusty cattle ranch, deer skulls lashed to the posts and a leathery old man pointing a shotgun at me? What if! Yeah, I don’t care! I’m hard core!

The road did not dead-end. It connected to other roads, as most roads do. The landscape got drier, the roads steeper, and the GPS still didn’t know about them. Finally it showed HWY 58 where the road I’d been following ended soon ended.::fuzzpic-right(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_7848.jpg”,”Winding over mountains.”):: I took 58 to Tehachape and, to avoid HWY 14, which I’ve driven plenty of times as well, I went over a ridge of about a million giant windmills and took a hypotenuse across the flat Mojave plain. This led me to what always seemed to me the world’s most unlikely exurbs of Palmdale and Lancaster. The GPS knew some of the roads here, but yet perplexingly few. I got a couple miles from 14 and finally saw another road taking me South-East back into the mountains and through the Angeles National Forest. This was another beautiful windy road through steep desert canyons but it ended, startlingly with a sign saying “Welcome to Santa Clarita”. This was followed, with no transition whatsoever, by the immediate explosion of the unremarkable hustle and bustle of the northernmost reaches of the Los Angeles megalopolis.

Even most of the streets in Santa Clarita weren’t known to the GPS and that’s when it hit me: I’d been messing around with some third-party maps my dad had downloaded and in the process failed to re-enable the original Garmin North America map file! I hadn’t noticed immediately because the thing apparently always minimally knows the major highways, which is all I’d been driving on. So much for the adventurous explorer. So much for hardcore.

I made it to L.A. a little early and went and got some coffee and checked my email… and… I’m famous in Ireland!

::fuzzpic-left(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_7855.jpg”,”It was Katie’s birthday. Good timing, me.”)::The rest of my time in L.A. has been fairly uneventful. I shared an Ethiopian birthday dinner, went to a cute little bar, slept on a couch, sat in traffic, went running on what used to be my favorite trail in the Santa Monica mountains, got really dangerously dehydrated, sat in traffic some more, got some dinner, went to a Shark Week party with Noah and David Blue wearing a life guard shirt and ketchup on my face while Dave chased me with a card board fin duct taped to his back.::fuzzpic-right(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_7863.jpg”,”Shark party. Duh.”)::

Maybe today I’ll get to Eastern Arizona or Western New Mexico. I’m going to try to track down some hot springs to camp at tonight. I won’t pretend to get myself lost; I’ve turned the detailed map back on.

3 Responses to “Wednesday, August 5, 2009, Los Angeles, CA”

  1. mom Says:

    Interesting article, but why the Irish Times?

  2. Stephen Says:

    The link is screwy, too.

  3. askory Says:

    Link fixed (damned fancy quotes!).

    Don’t really know why Ireland. They clearly have good tastes in newsworthiness!

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