In Between Dreams

I see zebras and humpbacks along the coastal highway toward Big Sur. The zebras are leftovers from newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s zoo in the backyard of his castle in San Simeon.  The striped horses are trotting through fields of lifeless grasses dried brown under a relentless sun.  The pod of whales is splashing waves with their tailfins and shooting geysers of seawater through their blowholes.

 

California is in another drought.  This means that you have to bear the stench of a Porta Potty to relieve yourself at a museum, or otherwise hold your bladder until you can find a convenience store or a convenient set of bushes that provides ample camouflage.  Americans flocked to the Golden State because they wanted the sunshine, but now there’s too much of it.  I am only passing through, but I don’t understand why people like it here so much.  Gas is expensive.  Grocery stores charge you for plastic bags.  It’s dreadfully hot and overly crowded.  Yet there’s a specific brand of dreams solely fixed on Californian imaginings.  A California dream is a subdivision of the American Dream, but the two could be synonymous.

I never understood the allure of moving to a place you’ve never visited, but we’ve all been exposed to advertisements inviting us to California.  Hollywood is an omniscient force invading nearly every American home.  Super Bowl teams go to Disneyland after their victory.  Nobody mentions a trip to a mid-sized city in Missouri where people can earn decent incomes, drive a reasonable commute to the office, root for a baseball team with a history of consistent success, and have a big backyard.  We are engineered to think that a move to Missouri is settling, so we shoot for the stars and head to California.

The same drought that made water bills soar also made a trip to Yosemite less eventful.  There is no water left to fall in places where it is normally gushing.  A sign that indicates the position of Yosemite Falls looks like a mislabeled exhibit.  The Tuolumne Meadows are not luscious with wildflowers but mostly a barren field with few survivors.  My timing is off, so I decide to head for the eastern exit.  Darkness falls, so I car-camp at nine thousand feet in a parking lot before a campsite that is under construction.  The temperature drops into the thirties, so I bundle up beneath the covers.  In the morning, there is frost on my windshield that melts on the way to the desert.

The car plunges into a sweltering furnace where I’m surrounded by sand.  A coyote pants under the shade of a creosote bush; the animal’s tongue dangles from its mouth like a strand of over-chewed bubblegum.  I have heard about dry heat, and I’m not sweating, but I feel as though someone is forcing me to breathe through a hair dryer while someone vacuums the insides of my lungs. 

Death Valley is the hottest place on Earth, and today’s forecast calls for 113 degrees Fahrenheit.  The temperature gauge on my car surges toward the red, and I wonder if this twenty-year-old machine will break down in one of the most dangerous places to be stranded.  I have a gallon of water, two bottles of sunscreen, and a fold-up bike in the trunk in case all goes wrong.

A sign warns me to turn off my air conditioner to avoid overheating, but my air conditioner doesn’t work.  I have the windows down, and the heat is on full blast and directed toward my shins.  I read in the Chevy manual that you can pull heat from the engine this way.  My shins are burning as the car chugs its way up the slope.  Any minute the engine could die, so I ease forward gently until I can pull over to the side of the road on flat ground.

 

I lift the hood to let the engine breathe the scant desert breezes, and I recline the driver’s seat and try to read a book that fails to engross me.  Every minute or so I check the temperature gauge to see if it is falling.  I know I will have to descend even further below sea level.  Today will be a true test to see if the car can survive a coast-to-coast journey from California to Florida.  Anything beyond Texas will surpass my expectations.

I wait a half an hour before revving the engine again.  The gauge is on the halfway point, so I press onward.  After stopping and resting another three times, I finally reach Stovepipe Wells where I eat a pint of ice cream in the shade and race the declining sun before my dessert melts.  Even in the shade, I feel desiccated from inside-out. Instead of removing layers, I don a thin hoody that covers my arms and neck.  The Bedouins know how to survive these climes, so I emulate their strategy. 

The crusty salt flats at Badwater Basin, the lowest land elevation on Earth, indicate a lake that dried up.  Somehow, in all of California, there is a puddle of water here.  I wonder what the night sky would look like from Death Valley, but I can’t stick around to find out.  Behind me to the west lay the Alabama Hills, a popular backdrop for Hollywood cowboys to ride off into the sunset.  As I cross the Nevada border with the sun at my back I can see the light pollution from Vegas.  In between dreams lay a harsh, but beautiful desert and an overheated car that thought it could but barely did.