April 18-20, Area 54, Zion and Arches national parks
At the Nevada casino where we had breakfast, we slipped past the all-night desperados, with cigarettes hanging from their lips, pumping away at the slot machines. We paused out front just long enough to read the plaque about legendary frontiersman Jack Longstreet, the “reluctant gunfighter.”
Driving as fast as we could, we skirted Las Vegas, aiming instead toward the promised land of Zion National Park. We made it through Area 54 without being kidnapped by aliens, but were stopped temporarily the world’s largest firecracker, set up by the side of the road. These folks will do anything to get a tourist to check them out and buy a t-shirt.
The world’s largest firecracker?
The sunset was starting to fire up the sky as we entered the narrow Zion park tunnel and parked by the Canyon Rim trail, where we hiked with wild mountain goats as night fell.
Zion’s gateway town of Springdale, UT was full of tourists willing to spend too much money, spoiling the local folk to a lifestyle that did not favor customer service. The brain-dead hostess at the crowded Spotted Dog Café unforgivably gave up our table while we were waiting for over an hour at the bar.
Our hotel’s panoramic views of the raspberry-colored Zion rock formations probably justified its exorbitant price, but the whole self-satisfied smugness of the town encouraged us to move on.
Our next stop was picked out on the map because it was on the way to Arches National Park. If Springdale was a tourist trap for people with too much money, we found Green River, UT to be an abandoned outpost wishing desperately to bring the tourists back. Folks here voted for Trump because they hoped he could might restore them to life. Even ghost towns looked more vibrant than this gauntlet of boarded-up gas stations, shops and motels. Finally we spotted our lighted motel at the far end of town. Its parking lot was full of pickups from the road maintenance crews who would also be spending the night there with us. It cost a third of what we had spent in Springdale, including a free breakfast with the road workers the next day.
For dinner, there was one take-it-or-leave-it option in town: the Tamarisk. They were thrilled to see us and showed us immediately to their best booth, overlooking the river. This brave place was filled with farmers and ranchers who had driven in from far away for a special night out.
We had seen their cattle and crops, which were hard-scrabble compared to the lush fields of California’s Central Valley. As we drove through the rugged, semi-arid terrain of Utah, I was beginning to understand the Sagebrush Rebellion, which surfaced first during the Reagan years, stirred by westerners from Utah, Wyoming and other non-California states. With so much of the West’s open land tied up in national forests, monuments and parks, ranchers felt the federal government had taken away their birthright.
California had the opposite situation: the federal government installed water projects on privately owned land. The desert bloomed, generating billions of dollars for corporate investors, including companies like Tenneco who had originally bought up the dry land for railroads and oil exploration. The Chandler family who owned the Los Angeles Times was still tied in to these secret land purchases and self-serving federal water subsidies when I joined the staff in 1975, but the newspaper under Otis Chandler was in the process of upgrading its ethics and quality, so I was able to write honestly about this entanglement without getting fired.
At the Tamarisk restaurant, John and I admired the “Rural and Proud” sign over the dining room. The middle-aged waitress, who couldn’t have been more pleasant, volunteered that these were hard times. She had advised her kids to go off to college, joining all the other young people who were leaving town. Even though her family had been there all their lives, her sister had decided recently she would have to close her beauty salon. The highway had been developed in another direction. The tourists had disappeared. Most people visiting Arches National Park now stayed in the more famous town of Moab.
We drove the next day through majestic Arches National Park, which like Zion and Bryce, was a natural Disneyland of improbable rock formations. John called this “God’s workshop,” full of behemoths and arches carved out of the red sandstone by eons of wild winds.
At the Moab Diner for lunch, we celebrated this glorious landscape. John claimed it was my birthday so they gave me a free ice cream sundae. I felt guilty, but not too guilty to eat it, a week in advance of the actual event. No wonder I gained 10 pounds on this road trip!
April 17-18: Death Valley and the Amargosa Opera House
As we drove south on Rte 395 and east on 190 through the menacing landscape called Death Valley, we imagined the extraordinary hardships that pioneers, explorers, Mormons and gold rushers endured as they tried to reach the promised land. Snow-capped, treacherous mountain passes awaited them even if they survived crossing this relentless, desert that offered so little to sustain them. People had to be delusional to want to take this route on purpose.
A formidable terrain
Along the way, we stopped to pay our respects at the bleak Manzanar internment campsite, one of 10 places where the nation’s Japanese-Americans were imprisoned in the middle of the desert during World War 2 without due process. https://www.nps.gov/manz/index.htm
Neighbors simply took over their houses and businesses as innocent Japanese-Americans were rounded up in a few days, following the Pearl Harbor attack by Japan, and forced to live under guard in these military camps. The camp layout included barracks with straw mattresses, bare lightbulbs, and communal latrines. They tried to imitate normal life here for three years, setting up schools, churches, housing, workplaces and other institutions. Some 11,070 Japanese-Americans came to live in Manzanar, in rough barracks with eight people living in each 20 by 25 foot room. The very first building, at the right of the entry guardhouse, was home of the “Manzanar Free Press,”a newspaper that also operated a general store and a barber shop.
We left the windswept remains of this sad history behind and drove into Death Valley National Park, an even more forbidding wasteland. At 282 feet below sea level, it is the lowest point in America. Luckily, because it was April, the temperature was only in the high 70s. Our 45-minute drive through the Artists Palette loop featured colorful mineral deposits splashing swirls of blue, green, red, yellow and orange in the sandstone. The place seemed utterly devoid of animals, plants, water, or shade. The mapless 19th century pioneers had to make impossible choices, following one guide or another through this deadly desert, in search of the “old Spanish road” through the mountains.
Artists’ Palette
When night fell, we drive to Zabriskie Point to experience a true “dark sky,” full of stars, a tiny sliver of moon, and no other light. It was intimate, silent, and overwhelming. As we drove along the road in deep darkness, a black beast loomed suddenly at the edge of the road. We nearly collided with a magnificent wild pony and were grateful that it was only a close call. Packs of wild horses roam the area, protected by some of the local Indians. They are supposed to be rounded by government folks and slaughtered, because they pose a hazard to drivers like us. But whose desert is it anyway? Certainly these creatures deserve the right of way…
Aside from flash floods and wandering horses, Death Valley is easily traversed now by car, thanks to government roads and maps. There are no gas stations or stores, and only one or two places to buy food and water, including one rather upscale chain hotel where we encountered an attempt at fine dining, despite zero local food or water resources. We chose to sleep in a more modest spot, just outside the park, at Death Valley Junction.
The eccentric and colorful Amargosa Opera House and Hotel was a former borax miner’s dormitory, with 14 private hotel rooms for visiting mine investors. It remains a ramshackle establishment, hanging on to life in the middle of nowhere. It has plumbing and hot water, but otherwise there is no food, no town, no gas station, no houses, no people, or other civilization in Amargosa Valley to speak of. The nearest breakfast is at a seedy casino 7 miles down the road.
Marta Beckett, a Radio City Rockette, invented the place with her husband after their car broke down here in 1967. She had had a very sad life in New York. A talented ballerina, she had been declared too tall. Her mother said her husband no longer loved her because Marta had been born. This philandering father told Marta that she should never show herself on a public stage. Leaving this awful family behind, Marta decided to buy the ghost town of Amargosa Valley, with its abandoned hotel and social hall. She and her husband personally rebuilt the hall into a theater by hand, and restored the hotel rooms. She painted the elaborate murals, creating a permanent adoring 16th century audience on the walls that would always be smiling down at her, even if she was dancing all alone on the stage.
Marta, liberated from the precision conformity of the Rockette kick line, now performed her own theatricals, which she wrote, danced and sang exactly as she wished. Her husband had enough of this after a few years, and ran off with Marta’s best friend back in New York. Marta chose to rise above this new loss, spending the rest of her life dancing for serendipitous audiences who somehow managed to find her here. She even took up with the Falstaffian handyman, Thomas Willett, who was nicknamed “Willget” because when something needed fixing, he said “I will get to it later.” She put him on stage in funny costumes, as her comic foil. She died in 2017 at the age of 92, and the place is trying to hold on as a nonprofit cultural organization, booking musicians and artists from time to time.
We found the very basic Amargosa Opera House and Hotel to be remarkably clean and comfortable, and improbably, it was fully booked. Hopeful tourists from Europe and China were turned away all afternoon. It cost about $100 a night, with $10 extra to tour the extraordinary opera house, http://www.amargosa-opera-house.com/
We packed up Easy Rider in the 65-degree sunshine at Sanchez St. in the Castro, and savored a final cup of tea, overlooking the hidden garden of our neighbor. We bid goodbye to this fragrant bower with two resident turtle doves, a little green humming bird, a lemon tree and a giant vine of pink and yellow roses, which bloomed as large as grapefruits. These California treasures had been just out of reach to us, untended and unharvested below.
It was hard to leave our local loved ones. We will miss them and Land’s End with its 300 shipwrecks under the surf, the Point Lobos surfers, the Sutro bath ruins, dinner at the Cliff House, Twin Peaks, Golden Gate Park, the Marin Headlands, St. Gregory’s of Nyssa church, the Sanchez St wiggle, brunch at the Presidio, the DeYoung, hiking up Bernal Hill, the giant rainbow flag at the top of Market and Castro, the Berkeley campus, Chez Panisse, and so much more. We will never forget the gauntlet of sad homeless folks, some of them stoned out of their minds, who set up camp on virtually every street corner and sidewalk.
At 11:15 a.m. Sunday we headed across the Bay Bridge, through Sacramento, climbing up into the Sierra Nevada mountains to Lake Tahoe. Just before the sign to Sutter’s Mill, where the 1949 gold rush began, we stopped at a gas station to buy tire chains. There was an ominous weather report.
As we drove through ill-fated Donner Pass, the temperature dropped. As the story goes, the infamous Donner party of westward pioneers survived the winter of 1846-7 here only by eating some of its own people. Luckier settlers moved quickly to tame this savage wilderness: just 50 years later, elegant Victorian hotels were welcoming tourists at nearby Lake Tahoe.
The snow showers began as we pulled into Tahoe City, where our log cabin at The Cottages Inn offered a cosy respite. Red plaid wool blankets warmed the bed, and hunter’s caps and jackets decorated the walls. Thunder cracked to tell us the weather was taking a turn for the worse. Hot cider and Scrabble kept us out of trouble until supper time, which was next door at a lakefront lodge with a giant stone fireplace decorated with a magnificent buffalo head. We had come a long way from San Francisco’s vegetarian sensibilities.
The locals told us that bears might break into our car overnight if we left anything for them to eat. Even a scented chapstick might draw them in, after the long winter’s privations.
It started to snow in earnest.
The bears left us alone, but by morning, we had to sweep about 9 inches of perfect powder off Easy Rider. John looked longingly at the cross-country skiing possibilities. Instead, we headed south on 395 through Bridgeport—with a 1950s-style lunch at a hotel where Mark Twain once stayed.
Mark Twain slept here
The snow disappeared, and there were no other tourists. We drove past lakes and mountains shrouded in a cold fog, stopping only at saline Mono Lake, where alas the ranger station was closed for plumbing repairs.
Lake Tahoe
The dwindling lake, which was requisitioned by Los Angeles for drinking water, was saved by a lawsuit, John discovered. Los Angeles had to pump some water back into Mono, and now its levels are rising.
Mono Lake
We passed Manzanar, and remembered how Norman Mineta and others in Congress worked to win reparations for the Japanese interned during WWII . The Manzanar ghost village reminded us of the layout of the Nazi concentration camps. Of course there were huge differences; here there was food and medical care; there were no gas chambers, no death marches, no final solution.
Manzanar
We arrived at nightfall in Bishop, a classic all-American town in the Paiute Shoshone territory. The locals said the best dinner in town was at The Back Alley bowling alley. After unusually good T-bone steaks and baked potatoes, we strolled over to the lanes. They were swarming with a local league of bowlers, many of them from the local Native American Paiute tribe. An older man teased his preteen grandson, who earlier in the day had his first sex education class. “Which did you like better, the birds, or the bees?” he asked the boy.
A friendly Paiute woman was putting away her bowling ball, and invited us to sniff its surprising pineapple scent. “My boyfriend has a red ball that smells like cinnamon,” she said. The Dude and his bowling companions would have been as amazed as we were that Storm bowling balls now feature such exotic options.
Living in the heart of darkness (Silicon Valley) for the past three months has taught me that we cannot pin our hopes for American democracy on the great media platforms: Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, et. al. Their leaders seem to know only how to make money from us, and the tools they have invented are out of control. The companies are proving incapable of dealing with the information dystopia they have created. Digital innocents think they are accessing an agnostic information universe when they click onto these platforms. Instead, we are getting the content most likely to confirm our prejudices, based on all the private information we have shared through our online search, posting, shopping and “like” histories.
Mark Zuckerberg is the man in the hot seat, forced to defend the tech platforms’ vampire business model to Congress. People are just beginning to wake up to the problems generated by these data-sucking companies. Facebook now has 2 billion members around the world, whose private preferences are the “product” Facebook has given to any “advertiser” that comes along. Because they know so much about us, Facebook’s clients–malicious Russian robots and conspiracy theorists included–can figure out exactly how to win our trust. Analysts who know Facebook intimately, including Kara Swisher of RECODE and Farhad Manooj of the New York Times, confirm that Zuckerberg and his peers have no idea how to deal with, or even measure, the profound social and political impacts they have unleashed.
Google, which has the most data of all, has done a marginally better job of weaning its search engine off robotic conspiracy theories. But it has failed to care much about the fake news and hate speech its subsidiary, YouTube, turns up as preferred content.
Belatedly, as the techlash gains force, some folks in Silicon Valley are thinking about software solutions. Below is one look at whether the algorithms that got us into so much trouble can reverse course, and nurture our better natures. This depends entirely on the values and priorities of the people writing the code for it. Given the track record so far, this is not reassuring. We need laws that companies must follow. This requires government policies, demanded by media literate citizens using their real intelligence.
I don’t think that ceding more power to algorithms is the best solution. It may be part of the response, but it can’t be the whole story. I like the idea floated by Markos Kounalakis: create a Mayor of Facebook. Create accountability through human, democratic systems, so that people can help other people when they are doxxed, their identities are stolen, and their safety is compromised by viral hate videos. Here is Markos’s brilliant idea:
We’ve had an amazing three months in San Francisco and Berkeley, but now that the snows are melting back East, and the boys are swinging their bats, it’s time to head home. Easy Rider is tanned, rested and ready. We the drivers, not so much, thanks to a wonderful round of farewells that continue for several more days. We depart April 15 and will find our way through many national parks and heartland cities. On the horizon: Lake Tahoe, Death Valley, Zion, Bryce, Denver, St. Louis, Louisville, Gettysburg and other iconic spots. Stay tuned for reports and photos! Wish us smooth roads, generous truck drivers, and colorful encounters. As we say goodbye, here are a few snapshots to remember our adventure out West.
Our hotel’s panoramic views of the raspberry-colored Zion rock formations probably justified its exorbitant price, but the whole self-satisfied smugness of the town encouraged us to move on.
When night fell, we drive to Zabriskie Point to experience a true “dark sky,” full of stars, a tiny sliver of moon, and no other light. It was intimate, silent, and overwhelming. As we drove along the road in deep darkness, a black beast loomed suddenly at the edge of the road. We nearly collided with a magnificent wild pony and were grateful that it was only a close call. Packs of wild horses roam the area, protected by some of the local Indians. They are supposed to be rounded by government folks and slaughtered, because they pose a hazard to drivers like us. But whose desert is it anyway? Certainly these creatures deserve the right of way…
