We left the dinosaur tracks behind and headed toward Kansas’s Chisholm Trail, stopping at the historic watering holes of Hays and Abilene. This was truly the wild west 150 years ago, when gun-slinging cowboys herded 5 million Texas longhorn cattle through this flat and fertile land, infuriating both the local cattle ranchers and civilized society.
“In 1866, cattle in Texas were worth only $4 per head, compared to over $40 per head in the North and East, because lack of market access during the American Civil War had led to over stock of cattle in Texas.—Wikipedia, The Chisholm Trail
We didn’t see many cattle, as we passed through vast stretches of wheat fields and windmills. Finally we pulled off to a side road, without any promise of a real town or a restaurant, and stumbled upon Lulu’s, whose hand-lettered sign offered no hint of the vibrant establishment inside. We sat a few tables away from a dozen motorcycle dudes in full leather and tattoos. Audie, our waitress, said the place was “blue collar, but family-oriented.” Pointing to the vast dance floor, she recommended coming back for the live bands, alternating country and rock music, on weekends. There was a horseshoe pitch out back, she added.
We reluctantly pushed off, because we needed to get to Abilene by nightfall. But there was one more unexpected stop that we couldn’t resist. “Vitame Vas! Wilson, Czech Capitol of Kansas,” said the sign along the highway. We turned off for a quick visit, eager to reconnect with our Czech memories from living in Prague from 1998-2000.
Sure enough, in the middle of once-thriving Wilson, next to the remains of a giant grain elevator and the weedy railroad tracks, we encountered the world’s largest Czech Easter Egg.
Hoping for some immigrant stories to go with it, we followed the weather-beaten signs to the Czech cultural center. Alas, it was nowhere to be found among Wilson’s modest houses and shuttered storefronts. So we stopped at the sole establishment that seemed open, a bakery and café with a homemade sign indicating its name was Made From Scratch. The waitress was friendly, especially since strangers didn’t stop in Wilson very often. But she had bad news for us. She guessed that the Czech cultural center burned down years ago. Seeing our disappointment, she motioned to an old guy at the bar, with a flowing beard. Joe pieced together some directions for where it might be. “Where are you from?” he asked. “Boston,” we said. “Take me with you,” he said.
We cruised around town, peering in the window of one possible place, hoping to try out our Czech. But no one answered the bell. Even the Chamber of Commerce was closed.
So here in Kansas was another haunted rural outpost, like Green River, UT, that once bustled with promise. Wilson had its days of agricultural glory and hopeful, hard-working immigrants. On a sunny Monday in mid-April, there was little left to see or do there.The town seemed deserted and the businesses closed. Yet still the remaining townsfolk displayed a unique contribution to America’s greatness: a gigantic, perfectly painted Czech Easter Egg. Wishing we could come back in July for the promised after-harvest Czech festival, we left, saying “Dobry Den!” and “Na schledanou” to no one in particular, out the car window, in case someone might hear us and take heart.
April 20-21 Glenwood Hot Springs and Lakewood, Colorado
Driving east into Colorado, we found Glenwood’s sulphorous hot springs especially relaxing after the dusty hike through Arches. We had ascended in a snow storm through the Rocky Mountains. Freezing sleet fell on our heads as we soaked in the open-air pool, but we were oblivious, melting in the hot waters. It took a hearty dinner to restore our energy and our ambition to keep going.
Sulphurous Hot Springs
The next morning we crossed over the Continental Divide, stopping for lunch in Vail, where the slopes had closed for the season, so the tourists were gone. The snow stopped before we had to install our chains, but now the emergency roadside signs said the main highway to Denver was closed by a wildfire! The area has been suffering multiple years of drought. We managed to find our way past the smoky remains of the roadside fire, arriving at nightfall in Lakewood, the southern Denver suburb we had randomly picked out so we could avoid the city.
The dinosaur motif in our motel lobby should have tipped us off, but it took a while to figure out we had landed right next to Morrison, CO where the first Stegasauraus bones were discovered! We had stumbled into a mecca of dinosaur digs and archeology treasures. What a fabulous, unexpected joy to spend the next morning at Dinosaur Ridge, with its “Jurassic Time Bronto Bulges”, baby dinosaur tracks, and prehistoric mangrove swamp.
By mid-day it was time to make our own tracks to Hays, Kansas, which I remembered as a wild west cowboy town. We left behind the stormy Colorado mountain peaks, and descended onto an entirely different landscape: the flat, sunny wheat fields of America’s Midwest.
We surprised ourselves by skipping our beloved Monterey aquarium, and setting off instead to see something new: the John Steinbeck center in Salinas. Here on display was Rocinante–his Travels With Charley camper–and other mementos of the America he brought to life.
Steinbeck chose to represent the underdog, as a great journalist must do. He worked in the lettuce fields, instead of taking his place in Salinas’s middle class. His father was a California businessman, a middle manager at a flour company that went bust, and then, at Spreckels, the largest sugar company in the world. John Steinbeck was a contemporary of Hemingway, but he was more interested in social justice than proving his manhood. Steinbeck’s novels told the world about the invisible victims of the Great Depression, like the Dustbowl Okies, who fled from their forfeited farms to California, only to starve or be exploited there.
Banned and Burned
The city fathers in Salinas were not comfortable with the ugly truths he exposed, calling his work “Communist propaganda.” In Kern County, they banned his books and burned Grapes of Wrath in a town square! But Steinbeck prevailed, winning the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. Today there is fancy building in the middle of town, called the National Steinbeck Center. It is one of Salinas’ main touristic claims to fame.
As we headed up to San Francisco at last, John decided that we should also name our car, in honor of our own journey across America. It would be Easy Rider, after the iconic 1969 hippie road trip movie featuring Peter Fonda. Peter’s father Henry Fonda starred in the 1940 film of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which launched his film career.
When we finally arrived at Sanchez St., we were ready for this journey to end. Now we could settle in to the Wild West of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, with its rainbow flags, composting rules and counterculture history. Here, every fetish was a noble rebellion. The punky skunky smell was artisanal marijuana, sold legally at the nearby Apothecarium. When two young, white homeless men in a bedraggled tent set up on the sidewalk across from the laundromat, the police came to move them along. But instead of snarling and arresting them, the way they do in Budapest or New York, the officer asked, “Do you need services?”
Ah, we’ve come a long way, from Boston, and even Salinas. It’s time to cultivate our garden–and think about all that we’ve seen.
Jan. 13-14: Pioneertown and Hearst’s Enchanted Castle
As we left the desert, we couldn’t resist a side trip to Pioneertown, a Wild West film set still popular with tourists. All sorts of Hollywood B movies were made here. Pappy and Harriet’s, the funky café at the edge of town, has hosted famous country and rock performers on stage for 35 years.
After patting a few goats, taking snapshots and fortifying ourselves with iced tea at Pappy and Harriet’s, our desert idyll was over. We headed north, skirting the LA basin past Barstow and Bakersfield, toward Paso Robles.
Unstable Ground
We could have veered west into the dense labyrinth of LA, enjoying some of its Hollywood splendor before heading up the coastal Highway 1. I lived here twice, when I was in my early 20s– first on a Carpinteria mesa where I was a housemother at a boys’ prep school, and then in Malibu, when I had my favorite job as a general assignment reporter for the Los Angeles Times. John and I had planned to stay in Santa Barbara on Jan. 12 to visit my old friend Roxie, who lives on her grandparents’ avocado ranch. But she had to flee in the middle of the night on Jan. 9, as flash floods and mudslides roared by her house. The river of mud killed 21 people in Santa Barbara County, injuring 120 more, and destroying 100 homes.
As we detoured north on Jan. 13, a victim was still missing in the mud, which was blocking all north-south traffic on Santa Barbara’s main highway 101.
California is notoriously unstable, which is both its downfall and its genius. The abrupt tectonic movement of the earth, the wild fires and floods, also permeate its culture. In California, the expectation of the new allows people to migrate here and start again, defining themselves as they wish, without the historic constraints of ancestry or neighbors who know who you really are. Change is normal. It’s a place where you have to be young, no matter how old you are.
We drove inland, up the spine of the state, past solar and wind farms, and irrigated fields of citrus and grapes. This was, and always will be, Steinbeck country. A few figures huddled in the fields, picking winter crops. Darkness had already fallen when we finally turned toward the coast at Cambria. We could hear and smell the ocean, but we would have to wait until sunrise, to actually see it.
The next morning we headed down to the musky-smelling sea, walking on wet sand littered with driftwood and long ropes of kelp. We were surprised to see so many old surfers, still mounting the waves in their winter wetsuits.
Hearst’s Hilltop Folly
At Hearst Castle, we boarded a bus for the 5-mile, cliff-clinging ride up Hearst’s mountain. From here, William Randoph Hearst ran one of America’s greatest 20th century media empires, which he used without apology, to his own personal advantage. He took his father’s mining fortune, bought newspapers, and from 1919 to 1947, built this extraordinary set of buildings and gardens in the middle of nowhere. It ultimately encompassed 250,000 acres of prime coastal and grazing land. Aside from a term in Congress, Hearst never had the political career he lusted after. His extraordinary lifestyle on this mountaintop, complete with wild animals and frolicking Hollywood stars, was unsustainable. Now, as a California state park, his castle remains an unparalleled masterpiece, attracting 750,000 paying visitors each year.
Even in today’s era of obscene billionaire mega-mansions, Hearst’s project is the most ambitious private residence ever built in America. Donald Trump couldn’t begin to compete with its excess. The White House is a shack in comparison; Elvis’s Graceland is a broom closet. According to Wikipedia, Hearst’s great mountain top estate “featured 56 bedrooms, 61 bathrooms, 19 sitting rooms, 127 acres of gardens, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, tennis courts, a movie theater, an airfield, and the world’s largest private zoo.” Although he had to sell off his exotic animals after the 1929 stock market crash, a few zebras still mingle today with the cattle herd grazing on the grounds.
Today Hearst Castle is like an aging but still glamorous movie star, dependent on expensive reconstructions, illusions, and memories. For all its hubris, this place is magical. The credit goes to architect Julia Morgan, but apparently Hearst also had a hand in its design. He kept buying bigger tapestries and art works, forcing the exasperated Morgan to redo her carefully proportioned stone walls and ceilings. The estate combines genuine 3,000 year old treasures, including Egyptian, Roman, Greek and Renaissance artworks, mixed with homey touches, like the bottles of ketchup Hearst insisted on serving at his baronial table. Hollywood royalty were his ultimate decorative flourish; they flew in for house parties throughout the 1930s and 40s.
When we had picked this town out on the map, it was mostly because I knew we didn’t want to be in Palm Springs or its neighboring fancy resort towns. This would be an entirely different kind of place, a counterculture oasis. It was where Gram Parsons’ friends tried to fulfill his cremation request when he died of a drug overdose in 1973. A decade later, Joshua Tree National Monument (now Park) inspired the title of U2’s best and most famous album. Bono said, as he was creating the music, “I started to see two Americas, the mythic America and the real America.” [From Wikipedia: King, Philip, and Nuala O’Connor (directors) (1999). Classic Albums: U2 – The Joshua Tree (Television documentary). Isis Productions.]
We also saw more than one America, as we were driving across the continent to get here. There were rich Americans living in porticoed estates, next to poor Americans, in unpainted wooden shacks. There were Black American slave descendants, still waiting table for the white heirs to antebellum privilege, in unsustainable plantation houses that rented out rooms for the night. The original Native Americans were both everywhere and nowhere, thanks to relentless efforts by European, Hispanic and other interlopers to take over their territory. We met white Christians and black Christians, intimately close on the radio airwaves, but far apart in the physical world. There were East Asian immigrants working at gas stations, and fourth-generation Appalachian truckers who paid them for a cup of coffee. Underneath it all was the hot magma of politics, ready to spew forth at the slightest provocation: volcanic Trump fans and anti-Trump fanatics, who couldn’t stand to think about each other’s worthy existence. They were all Americans, engaging somehow in the same national destiny, without the common bonds of blood, history, or plans for tomorrow.
John booked us a romantic retreat at Campbell House in Twentynine Palms, which, appropriately, was deserted. We loved the story of the stone house’s construction in the mid- 1920s, by disreputable newlyweds. Elizabeth Crozer, a Philadelphia debutante, was disinherited when she ran off to marry Bill Campbell, an orphan who’d been injured by mustard gas in WW1. They were advised by Dr. James Luckie of Pasadena that the desert might heal his damaged lungs. The advice was brilliant. Bill survived another 20 years, long enough to live through the next world war, from their desert redoubt.
The healing qualities of the desert air were especially good news for us, since John and I were still coughing like crazy from the colds we picked up in the South. We got a little lost on our first night, driving under faint stars in the desert’s famously dark sky, to the Twentynine Palms Inn for dinner. It was great to finally be in Southern California, at the edge of the legendary Joshua Tree National Park! We felt better already. Was it the desert air, the live bluegrass music, or the margaritas? We waited for two seats at the bar, crowding in among the locals. This place had a special vibe, a kind of desert version of Rick’s legendary Casablanca café.
When the young Campbells camped out in the winter of 1924-5, in an isolated tent near the Mara Oasis, having a named Twentynine Palms was still a mirage, There were just seven or eight other shacks. The Campbells mingled with the Native American nomads who watered seasonally at the oasis, and became avid archeologists, documenting the earliest human life in the area. http://campbellhouse29palms.com/history.php
Elizabeth’s father relented and she received her inheritance, so they built their 1929 estate on 25 acres of high desert. After Elizabeth died in 1971, the children sold the property to the composer who wrote “Zip-a-de-Doo-Dah.” He turned it into a Hollywood party house. An English aristocrat then bought the place, installing her china teapot collection and renaming it Roughly Manor. Today it is the quirky Campbell House B&B, honoring the young couple who started their runaway marriage here.
We stopped at the Joshua Tree National Park headquarters the next day, full of rookie questions. What are Joshua trees, anyway? They looked like frenzied cactuses, arms all akimbo. They are actually short-spiked agave plants, the ranger explained. The smaller chocotillo cactuses, other denizens of this desert, grew huddled together like a tribe of chattering monkeys. And then there were the enormous sand-colored rocks, balancing against each other in random formations. What mighty force could have pushed them into such improbable dependancies?
We drove half and hour to lunch in the nearby hippie town of Joshua Tree, but took a wrong turn. We found ourselves dead-ending into a very large, official sign that said “Live Combat Zone. 100% I.D. required.” U.S. Marines came out of a formidable guard post to confront us. We turned the car around very, very quickly. It was a relief to find the right road, and stumble into the Crossroads Café. Its dreadlocked and tattooed waiters were escapees from places like East Harlem and Boston, and they occupied a completely different world from the Marine base close by.
The Crossroads Cafe
We learned that like everywhere else, the Native Americans had a terrible time in this area, as the newer Americans took over in the 20th century. There was the tragic death of a gifted Indian runner named Willie Boy, who fell in love with a non-Indian girl and committed suicide in 1909, after being framed for her murder. Folks are sorry about it now. What was done, is done, but that doesn’t mean it’s over with.
On our second night, as we took up our favorite perch at the Twentynine Palms Inn bar, we struck up a conversation with the folks sitting next to us. Some were from the local community college, and some from the Marine base. They were all friends. After hearing them talk about military things, I asked “What do you think about North Korea?” Their reaction was swift and unanimous: if Trump hit the nuclear button, General Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, would save us. He was sane, even if the Presidents of the United States and North Korea were not. One speaker said he grew up on various military bases, with a father who served in Vietnam. “I’m grateful for being exposed to the wider world,” he said, “so I know what Trump is.” How can we talk to Trump voters now? I asked innocently, holding my breath. “You don’t,” he said firmly. “You talk to them with your votes.”
Skull Rock
The next day was our last at Joshua Tree, so we took an especially long hike, on a path through the giant desert rocks. We watched for rattlesnakes that never appeared, stopping at Skull Rock, the Keys View lookout, and Barker Dam. I imagined the Campbells, carefully labeling Indian artifacts there, and the cattle rustlers and gold prospectors who died seeking their fortunes. To John, some rocks looked like sleeping elephant seals, and I saw others that were petrified whales or ghosts.
In the afternoon we stopped by the former one-room Twentynine Palms schoolhouse, now a museum. Normal glassware, left in the sun, would turn purple in the old days. The tiny museum was crowded with gray-haired visitors, one carrying an oxygen tank, another leaning on her walker. They were listening intently to an aged volunteer, who was glorifying the pioneers.They were oohing and ahing at a gold mine shaft.
The past: mining gold
Old people are building the past, I realized, looking around me. Young people are building the future.
We were going to be back on the road the next morning, driving north through Barstow, toward our San Francisco goal. In two days, we would be living in yet another America, the unstable epicenter of its high tech industries, where twentysomethings are mining artificial intelligence and virtual realities to invent another brave new world.
On our last night in Twentynine Palms, we watched a wobbly old videotape of John Huston’s “Grapes of Wrath,” which even in its original black and white, is a magnificent movie. It prepared us for the final push of our journey, through Monterey to Salinas, where John Steinbeck worked the lettuce fields and learned everything he needed to know, in order to write one of America’s greatest, and most devastating sagas.
Many of our friends seem to be in various stages of moving to Santa Fe, NM. The brother of one of our close Boston friends is running for Mayor here. Others, who have established themselves already in Santa Fe, participate in the Grumpy Grandpas lunch group and the Raging Grannies singing society. Our friends took us to Harry’s Roadhouse, where the owner perked up when he learned we were from Boston. He told us his Boston story: When he was hitchhiking once he got a ride with a Boston driver. As they were going down the highway, an ambulance suddenly screamed by, and the Boston driver abruptly switched lanes to follow the vehicle, careening dangerously closely behind him, at full speed. A policeman tried to pull him over for tailgating the ambulance. But the Boston driver kept driving, yelling back at the cop: “It’s my brother in there!”
That sounded more like Tennessee or Texas drivers, to us, but never mind. New Mexico has always been full of dreamers and artists, those who make history and those who make it up because it’s a good story. They enjoy myriad transcendental and intellectual approaches to the unknown, including sunset rituals, healing massages, Yoga, crystals, secret alien encounters and nuclear experiments, paranormal phenomena, and the devil’s own hot sauce. Other states have politicians who do corrupt and bad things, our friend observed, but New Mexico suffers from a different problem: politicians who do nothing.
Snowy portholes for the solstice dagger of light
I have always loved New Mexico. This time we visited not only our hosts’ graceful hacienda, but also the work-in-progress artist’s house being taken over by other friends, who are in the process of abandoning New York City to move here. Their adopted home needs a lot of repairs. But it has a magic secret. Through a series of strategic portholes in the thick adobe walls, the sun, at the time of solstice, shines through as a solid shaft of light, piercing the entire house.
Alas, my timing was wrong for this miraculous display. Our visit was hampered by my head and chest cold, which was getting worse by the hour. I felt as if I were spreading plague. John, who had gotten sick first in Mississippi, was feeling better now in New Mexico. So he carried on sociably while I fled to our bedroom to sneeze. There would be no visits to Ten Thousand Waves this time, for massages and lunch. Instead we bought several boxes of Kleenex and hit the road on Jan. 9 for Gallup and Flagstaff.
The Texas panhandle had been a series of small rancheros. In New Mexico, we found a few scattered cows and sheep grazing in deep canyons and along flat-topped mesas, sun-washed in ochre and yellow. We were amused by a billboard on I-40 outside Albuquerque, consisting only of the famous bushy black eyebrows, eyeglasses, and mustache of Groucho Marx. “Laugh More,” it said. We did.
Driving parallel to Route 66, we wondered what it actually looked like. At lunchtime we finally turned onto the historic road, where we found the El Rancho Hotel, a once-famous wild west film location. Guest rooms were named for all the top movie stars who stayed here. Forty years later, it seemed pretty quiet, with just a few locals in the café.
El Rancho Grande
Heading toward Flagstaff, AZ, we took a side trip to the Petrified Forest, near Holbrooke. Trees that grew over 200 million years ago washed down here into a massive volcanic sea, and petrified into gorgeous giant stones.
Randy the park ranger told us that the fierce crocodile skeleton displayed at the Visitor Center was a Smilosuchus, dating from the dawn of the dinosaurs, in the Triassic period. https://www.nps.gov/pefo/learn/management/images/smilosuchus-cast.jpg?maxwidth=1200&autorotate=false He said some relatives of this dinosaur grew to be 80 feet long! With this frame of reference, Homo Sapiens seem ridiculously small and arriviste.
With a new sense of our own insignificance, we retired to our Courtyard hotel in Flagstaff, AZ. The next morning, the car was covered with snow!
We had to watch for icy patches on the highway as we headed toward Kingman, where the cozy Siren’s Café had already run out of lunch specials by 12:30 p.m. A postman breezed in, singing to the crowd, “Here’s your mailman!” He hand-delivered packages to each staffer behind the counter, and then turned to the entire room, saying “Thank you for employing me!” Everyone laughed and applauded. Even though it was snowy outside, he was wearing shorts!
Fortified by warm food and good humor, we crossed through a long, lonely stretch of the Mohave Desert into California. All we could see was a mirage on the horizon, as the gas gauge warned us of pending doom. In the nick of time a real oasis appeared out of nowhere, on Route 66 in Fenner. The gas station was owned by a Seventh Day Adventist who strategically placed religious pamphlets on giant display racks that had to be navigated by anyone trying to visit the restroom.
Our own salvation lay many miles ahead, in the Joshua Tree National Park. We didn’t know it yet, but miraculous margaritas and live music were waiting for us, at the Twentynine Palms Inn.
We didn’t see many cattle, as we passed through vast stretches of wheat fields and windmills. Finally we pulled off to a side road, without any promise of a real town or a restaurant, and stumbled upon Lulu’s, whose hand-lettered sign offered no hint of the vibrant establishment inside. We sat a few tables away from a dozen motorcycle dudes in full leather and tattoos. Audie, our waitress, said the place was “blue collar, but family-oriented.” Pointing to the vast dance floor, she recommended coming back for the live bands, alternating country and rock music, on weekends. There was a horseshoe pitch out back, she added.
When we had picked this town out on the map, it was mostly because I knew we didn’t want to be in Palm Springs or its neighboring fancy resort towns. This would be an entirely different kind of place, a counterculture oasis. It was where Gram Parsons’ friends tried to fulfill his cremation request when he died of a drug overdose in 1973. A decade later, Joshua Tree National Monument (now Park) inspired the title of U2’s best and most famous album. Bono said, as he was creating the music, “I started to see two Americas, the mythic America and the real America.” 
That sounded more like Tennessee or Texas drivers, to us, but never mind. New Mexico has always been full of dreamers and artists, those who make history and those who make it up because it’s a good story. They enjoy myriad transcendental and intellectual approaches to the unknown, including sunset rituals, healing massages, Yoga, crystals, secret alien encounters and nuclear experiments, paranormal phenomena, and the devil’s own hot sauce. Other states have politicians who do corrupt and bad things, our friend observed, but New Mexico suffers from a different problem: politicians who do nothing.
