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Wanderung 8

Swinging Sweetly through the Sunny South.

January-February 2005

February 5, 2005 - Drive to Joshua Tree National Park

We had arranged to meet Chris at Joshua Tree National Park by 11:30, so we hustled through breakfast and packed up the trailer. Monika's ankle was so sore that for the most part she was sitting in a chair watching the operations. Unfortunately, she didn't see the tight clearances as I was pulling the trailer forward and I broke the plastic lens on one of the side marker lights. That was irritating, but after picking up the pieces and dumping the wastewater tanks, we were finally on our way by 8:30.

Our chosen route lead us back a short way on I-8 to El Centro followed by a turn north on California 86. We followed 86 around the Salton Sea area on the north side of the Imperial Valley. It looked large and broad but quite shallow to me and Chris had said that it wasn't really worth stopping for, so we continued northward until we intersected with Interstate 10. There we turned east for about 20 miles until we arrived at the southern entrance to Joshua Tree National Park. Despite the fact that it was Saturday, which in our experience is always the most crowded day to find a campsite, there were many campsites available in the Cottonwood campground area. It had flush toilets and a central water spigot, which was noticeably better than the pit toilets and complete lack of water that characterized the other campgrounds in the park. Besides which, the price was right at $5 per night so Monika signed us up for 2 nights.

Chris showed up while Monika was signing in at the Visitor Center, so he helped us set up the trailer to an almost-level position (crucial for the refrigerator to work properly), and then I cooked lunch. This was a Can Man (Motto: "Who can? The Can Man can!") meal, which is to say I opened cans and carefully followed directions to create a satisfying meal. To be truthful, it was certainly not haute cuisine, but I also felt it was not cuisine merde, either.

In any event, the meal gave us enough energy to go for drive around the park. Chris drove us as he had visited Joshua Trees NP many times. That let me see the scenery, which was magnificent in an austere sort of way, and let Chris drive the truck, which he seemed to also enjoy. Our first stop was the Ocotillo patch. The Ocotillo is a weird bushy tree-like type of cactus that has a lot of thumb-sized branches covered with tiny green leaves arising from a base about a foot or two in diameter. Its shape is right in between being either a proper bush or a proper tree, and the leaves are much smaller than you would find on either one, which made it rather interesting.

Our next stop was a whole field of Cholla cacti, sometimes called the Teddy Bear cactus because it looks so soft and furry. Those appearances are, as you might imagine, quite deceptive because the furry coating on the Cholla is actually a huge number of very long spines. The spines even have thin barbs at the end that tend to hook inside the skin and then break off when the spine is removed. The footpath wound through these things, and we had to be quite careful not to accidentally brush against one and have those dratted spines stick in our hides. Still, seeing these unique cacti was quit interesting; I never knew, for example, that they had a wooden skeleton inside that gave support. That was similar to the internal skeleton on the Saguaro cacti, and I wondered how many other cacti have wood skeletons inside.


 

We drove past one of the other park campgrounds and stopped in to see some magnificent rock formations. These formations are also one of the hallmarks of Joshua Tree National Park, and this campground was nestled right among huge boulders. It looked somewhat as if I some giants had been playing marbles but then just dropped them all to scatter around when they left for the day.

Joshua Tree National Park is named, of course for the Joshua Tree, and we saw hundreds of those when we drove up to the Keyes overlook. Although visibility from the overlook was only moderate due to air pollution, we had a great view of Palm Springs in the valley below, the San Andreas Fault (a small, raised ridge cutting through the valley floor), the coastal mountains to the west and even the Salton Sea to the south.

The Joshua Trees were large, ungainly trees related to the Yucca plant and having similar long, spiky leaves. The tree has branches stretching heavenward as if in prayer, and apparently that's why they were named for the prophet Joshua by the early Mormon settlers. The Joshua Trees tended to be spaced 10-20 feet apart rather than tightly clustered like the Cholla cacti, but when I looked across a plain with hundreds of them, they still gave the impression of some weird enchanted forest.

The sun went down as we drove out of the park on the northwest corner and then used highway 62 to circle back to the town of 29 Palms, refuel the truck, and come back into the park.

In the dark we missed the turnoff for the road to our campground and the GPS once again proved its worth by helping us backtrack and locate the intersection. Chris shared another simple dinner of sandwiches with us, after which Monika processed a batch of pictures while I stitched together some of the panoramic pictures I had taken and we both chatted with Chris, who is just a fascinating conversationalist with a wide range of interesting and firmly held opinions, most of which fortunately coincide with ours!

As usual, our conversations ranged over topics far and wide, but the one tidbit that seemed to surprise Chris the most was our habit of joint book reading. He was surprised that we read the same book and had worked out a non-verbal page-turning signaling system (it saves a bunch of unnecessary talking at the end of each page, which tends to break the flow of a story). He had never heard of such a thing, and honestly we didn't know any other couples that did it either, so that raised the issue of exactly how common or unique such a process was. But when he asked when we had started it and if we could remember the first book we had read together, we were both stumped. I had a vague impression that we began while we were Living In Sin together before getting married and that the book was "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein, but that was so vague it might have just been due to discussing the book with each other. Monika was similarly baffled, and it is possible that the joint book reading somehow crept into our marital repertoire somewhere over the decades, but it is certain that neither of us can remember a time when we were not doing it (joint reading, that is, keep the focus here!).

Somehow these discussions with Chris reminded me of the all-night Bull Sessions we used to have in college where we would talk about Big Issues like Life, Religion, Politics, Art, or Science. The difference was that back in college we all seemed to have the answers for those issues, even if the answers differed, but nowadays I'm not even sure what the right questions would be! Still, it is sad that we somehow never had the time for these type of serious but free ranging discussions after college, and I did briefly wonder if college students still did such things. Not that we were angels in college by any means; the all-night card games far outnumbered the all-night Bull Sessions in my recollection, and were probably responsible for the rather high flunk out rates among the guys on my dorm floor. It was all guys, of course, as we had strictly sex segregated dorms at that time. The Southern Baptists even closed our dorm down right after we asked to be able to have girls visit the dorm during stipulated hours on Friday and Saturday nights, but that, of course, might have been sheer coincidence (I think not!). Be that as it may, the three of us finally ran out of mental gas around 9 and turned in for the night.

Copyright 2005 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

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