A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Joshua Tree National Park

Blue sky, yellow sun, our tempers as red and as short as our water supply. All of us salt encrusted and glistening with sweat in the relentless 100-degree heat. We are stumbling through a massive jumble of granite boulders, their rough surfaces shredding bare skin like heavy grit sandpaper. Marty’s in the lead. Suddenly he screams in agonized surprise, twisting and falling! I clock a diamondback rattler slither away at speed. Thinking quickly, I drop my pack and rush to his side. The fang holes in his calf are eerily precise, premeditated, mechanical. “Stay still!” I command, as he writhes, thrashes and convulses. I squeeze the wound and then suck the venom from his twitching muscle. I spit the poison on to a scalding stone and wipe my mouth. “All right, boys,” I say, “I think it’s time for a cold beer.” Our friends Jacques, Jim and John gaze at me with awe and admiration. Marty grimaces his gratitude. He knows I’ve just saved his life but there’s really no need to thank me. We are men.

There are two fundamental plots in the stories we tell one another: man versus man, and man versus nature. Should there ever be a sports book on man versus nature, I’d take nature every time, game theory be damned. Aside from the noun, nature is not a human construct. It just is, and we’re in it, a part of it and not above it. Should the human species disappear, the planet we once tried to dominate will continue getting on with things, right itself without expensive therapy and antidepressants. National parks, nature somewhat unblemished, though a little less worse for wear, remind us of this.

We had stayed up rather late the night before agreeing an early start was essential. The next day’s forecasted high was a nice, round 100-degrees Fahrenheit. The high desert would be about ten degrees cooler. Five of us set off in two cars, heading west on Interstate 10; Tim elected to skip the excursion in order to gird for that evening’s proposed casino outing; he said he was going to text "WhoreDash" for lunch and watch a golf tournament. John and Marty were in the black Challenger. Marty likes to drive. Marty likes to drive fast. And if John decided to pull a Gram Parsons and get high in Joshua Tree National Park, Marty would get to drive the beast on pristine American blacktop. Jim drove the grey Toyota. Jacques was in the passenger seat rambling on a mile a minute because his carefully measured breakfast dosage of THC had kicked in. I know what Jim was thinking: “At least we’re not at the grocery store.” Hadn’t Jacques tried to buy everything at Costco last Sunday when the meds began their work in the cart corral? I was nested in the backseat, looking out the window, pleased I’d remembered to wear my glasses.

The landscape became strange almost immediately. There are a couple of thousand windmills at the west end of the Coachella Valley. Their propellers face east to harvest the Santa Anas which blow steadily from October through March. We drove through them before turning north to pick up the Twentynine Palms highway. I’m guessing we were a few hundred feet below sea level at the junction. And it was at that point the geology began to get really weird.

I’ve crossed a lot of boundaries in my life and so I was pleased to add the San Andreas Fault to the Continental Divide. It’s around the fault line where two of America’s four western deserts, the Colorado and the Mojave, mix, match and mingle. We climbed out of the transition zone entering the Little San Bernadino Mountains, driving through two hanging valleys, the Morongo and the Yucca, our ears popping nearly 3300 feet above sea level.

Marty had planned our route carefully. We continued east along Twentynine Palms Highway and entered the park at the north station. We would loop back west and exit the park outside the Town of Joshua Tree. Marty had also mapped out a couple of expeditions beyond the confines of our cars, aware that what he and Jim considered walks would constitute hikes for Jacques, John and me.

(Not wanting to be that guy, I spent the month prior to our trip gently attempting to upgrade my physical conditioning. God, you know, since my return I’ve learned that new habits are as difficult to keep as old ones are to break.)

My inclination as I write this post is to revert to cliché, to suggest Joshua Tree National Park resembles the surface of another planet. But it’s there and it’s here, isn’t it? I mean, I could be back inside its ranger gates inside the clock frame of an average working day. And I have seen the scrubby desert hills surrounding Kamploops, BC. I’ve seen desert and peculiar rock formations in Alberta’s Badlands. And I’ve seen a Joshua tree on an album cover. But I’ve never seen all those scenes together in one place.

Biblical Joshua was a thoroughly modern man, sort of like a local courier in our post-Amazon world or Rosie Ruiz, fresh to lead his people that last mile out of the desert to the finish line and conquer Canaan, that Promised Land. The Joshua tree is actually a yucca plant and was misnamed by Mormon pilgrims who imposed their own founding parallel “promised land” myth upon it, arms, spears or swords up. “This way!” Of course it should be noted that Mormons believe that Jesus spent the first-ever Easter long weekend in North America.

Our easy walk to Arch Rock, less than two miles there and back, was fraught. Poor Jacques was wearing enclosed sandals but no socks; the desert sand was insidious and gritty. Jim and Marty went off the trail (as is the wont of strangers, friends and relatives whose different perspectives have enriched my life) to clamber over and between granite boulders. What appears satin smooth from a distance isn’t. John and Jim, experienced scuba divers, compared the rock surfaces to coral; I thought of the new cheese grater back home in Edmonton in the kitchen cupboard. I realized very quickly I’m not as spry as I used to be. Atop the boulders but in a bowl of them, I lost my sense of direction which made me a little anxious as none of our party was in sight and a shout of “Here!” seemed to bounce from everywhere. Sideways between the giant ones in the merciful shade, I fretted about what else might be enjoying the cool seclusion, only to be annoyed by the intrusion of my flashing bare legs. And, really, Arch Rock wasn’t terribly grandiose, all that much to admire; it was just there, a geological accident whereas Skull Rock really lived up to its anthropomorphic billing.

Jim, a past visitor to Joshua Tree, told me the park was an entirely different experience after nightfall. Mind your step, but remember to look up. We were angle parked on a little lay-by, a few extra feet of Park Boulevard asphalt, and I looked around and realized there wasn’t a source of artificial light for miles in any direction. Jim has seen stars that I may never see. For a second I pondered the sanctity of preserved and conserved space in every dimension, the connectivity and totality of it all, national parks beautiful buffers against our baser instincts to develop and exploit. With the exception of the People’s Liberation Army’s activities in the South China Sea, nobody’s making any more land anymore. And I thought of the humbling importance of feeling insignificant amid the graduating immensity emanating from everything around us. A man’s got to know his place. But just for a second, because I was overcome worrying about just what the hell wakes up to work the night shift in a desert.

Our day trip then was only half the story of Joshua Tree. Still, Marty had planned our outing exquisitely. We finished up in the Joshua Tree Saloon, not too far from the park’s west station exit, his research, his planning, his call, pitchers of locally brewed Mexican-style lager on our table. Christ, I was thirsty and sometimes water just won’t do. Sitting there in southern California, I recalled a Montreal snowstorm in 1966. Marty and I grew up on the same street. We were in kindergarten together. We were stuck at school that day, snowed in and the yellow school bus stuck somewhere else. Marty said, “Fuck this, Geoffrey, I know the way home, let’s go.” So we did. He also helped me with my arithmetic for the duration of the 60s. And so, when the imaginary rattler bit him, what else would I do but act swiftly and decisively to save his life? 

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of rugged, manly outdoor adventurism since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from assorted retailers. 

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Coachella Valley

The great arched, sans serif, all caps Sonny Bono Concourse sign warned me I was in southern California. It never rains in the desert; most of the airport was open air and its architectural design shaved fifteen minutes off my usual post-flight nicotine fix agitation. As for Bono, not the U2 guy, a couple of duets, a leather vest, a bad haircut and a network variety show, man, your star shone brighter than most and you will never be forgotten until a little more time makes you a meaningless proper noun. I have come to terms with the fact that that is the fate that awaits me and anyone I’ve ever liked or loved.

Jim was patient with me, watching me smoke from a social, less stinking distance. I’d flown from Edmonton to meet him in Calgary and together we flew to Palm Springs. A long day for me. Anyway, we had to wait for our friend Jacques who was due minutes after us from Montreal via Toronto via Denver. A hellishly long day for him.  Our rented car was somewhere out there in one of the parking lots, basking patiently in the rays of the big hot sun. Jim’s brother John was due to arrive long after dark, up from Mexico through Dallas; John had rented a car of his own, a muscular Dodge Challenger. Tim’s arrival was Sunday, shortly after church let out. Marty would be tardy, Tuesday afternoon but not moody blue.

So, the Saturday vanguard, Jim, Jacques and I, was charged with stocking the base camp for the balance of our group. When we were all together in high school, nearly fifty years ago now, it didn’t matter what we put into our bodies. Times have since changed. Our shopping list was rife with particulars, some geared to avoid a potential and undesirable medical event, and others merely because middle aged white men can be awfully persnickety.

Base camp was a humongous bungalow in Rancho Mirage, one of the nine cities in the Colorado Desert oasis that is Coachella Valley. Our very, very fine house was within staggering distance to the Betty Ford Centre – that place has a big parking lot and it was full. Our house was also within a walled and gated development featuring another dozen or so homes just like it. Our elongated yard and the forecourt where the pool was were also walled for privacy. The only activity I saw outside on the wide crescent was other people’s gardeners. It took two days to find the front door of our place because it was seemingly added to the floor plan (designed by a kitten with a ball of yarn) as an afterthought, a fire regulations conformity.

This is the land of motors, for garage doors and cars. Highway 111 bisects the valley and it runs pretty much parallel to Interstate 10 which stretches from Los Angeles to Houston. From a distant passenger window the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa Mountains to the south resemble great mounds of excavated dirt. The tallest peaks are snow capped. The walls (some of whose tops sparkle with broken glass), houses, hotels and strip malls all share the desert’s palette. The green of the palm fronds, golf courses and other manicured areas is almost jarring. Irrigation water is diverted from the drought-stricken Colorado River via the Coachella Canal; the primary agricultural commodity is dates. All other water is pumped from the massive aquifer beneath the valley floor – please, God, don’t shut off that groundwater tap because the collectors, spillways, are full of weeds and wind strewn litter.

There’s money, or the illusion of it, floating around the shaded and misted restaurant and bar patios, and the high end outdoor malls. John lives in Cozumel, Mexico. I understand it’s fairly remote because a book I mailed him five years ago still hasn’t arrived. He’d flown north with an empty suitcase intending to pack it with books, basic clothing and sundries for himself and his wife. John’s a smart shopper: one excursion to reconnoiter followed by another one or two for actual purchasing. I tagged along to get the lay of the land complete with a bonus guided tour from a returning visitor. I knew it would be thirsty work, but maybe I’d find a record store.

We took 111 east to Palm Desert; I manned the Challenger’s satellite radio, eventually settling on “Classic Vinyl.” We ran the gauntlet from JCPenney in a nondescript mall with nesting crows in the shade of its parkade to Louis Vuitton on El Paseo. The Vuitton clerks, all dressed in black, did not glance up from their phones to notice the 47 Brand two-tone, three-quarter length sleeve Montreal Expos t-shirt I was sporting. Snobs. Our tour ended two doors down at Tommy Bahama. Well, who knew Tommy keeps a well-stocked bar on the second storey? I believe I was the youngest drinker in the place, but maybe that’s because the sun and the wind had yet to mummify my face and maybe those other leathery day drinkers didn’t even qualify for the 55-plus discount at IHOP. Shopping really can be fun.

One-eleven westbound leads to the well-spring of the Coachella Valley, Palm Springs, the getaway place for a bygone, coastal elite. Jim, Tim, Marty and I headed that way mid-week while John and Jacques went shopping. Palm Springs is renowned for its numerous examples of mid-twentieth century modernist architecture. Modernism in this application posits that one must be aware of, and understand one’s surroundings so that structural form follows structural function; not a startling revelation to anyone who ever constructed an igloo, lean-to or teepee. But it all looks as cool as Sinatra in his prime, baby. And because I dig detective noir, I could easily imagine Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer driving inland from LA to chase down a lead or wayward femme fatale. I suppose what makes Palm Springs so alluring compared to its sister cities like Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert are its relative age and modest scale, nothing within its confines is wretchedly excessive in size. Proof is pedestrians, actual pedestrians, the first ones I’d seen. And the four of us walked among them.

I am not a sophisticated traveler. I’m the rube who comes to town on Boeing with a wallet stuffed with American Express Travelers Checks. But I do know there are two types of tourist destinations and they mirror narrative voices, active and passive. Some places demand engagement and exploration and engagement, others just let a visitor be. Rancho Mirage and environs is the latter. The six of us conducting our mini social experiment could’ve set up house anywhere. The board of tourism literature was about golf and go-karts, not us being all together for the first time since the late seventies while figuring out who’s cooking and who’s cleaning.

There’s a reason why a simple table is such a compelling image or trope in myth, literature and real life, from King Arthur’s Court to a dreary collective bargaining session, we must sit around them and we are compelled to talk to and about one another. The highlights and high times of this trip, a part of the United States it would never occur to me to visit, were after the supper dishes and the day had gone. We sat back, all of us chairman of the board, the wine still flowing, rum and beer back in play, tobacco, THC and espresso.

The Coachella Valley certainly provided a dramatic setting for our reunion, spectacular if inconsistently so. But people, as pretty as they may be in southern California, tend to wreck pretty places wherever we are. And as much as I like to learn a little bit about where I am when I’m somewhere else, nothing else here matters as much as these people around the dining table, as I remember them and as I see them now if I squint to focus: full of grace and utterly gibbled, but not overly sentimental.            

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of luxuriously refined travel since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers. 

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Toute la gang, mon hosti

We were in the kitchen. The stereo was playing in the living room, a side of black vinyl from back in the day, gently eased from a worn sleeve with a white circle on it like a beer bottle ring on a coffee table. And if you're going to cover somebody else's song, do what Nazareth did to Joni Mitchell's This Flight Tonight: Go nuts and make it memorable.

Ann was talking to me about me and my school friends, the core of that nonexclusive leaderless gang that came with a free lifetime membership. And “school” with its primary and secondary definitions is a crucial adjective. Marty, Tim and I, all from the same Montreal neighbourhood and elementary school, met brothers Jim and John from Toronto, and Jacques, France’s smarmy exile, in the first or second year of high school. Young boys bond over sports, music, girls and getting wasted. Our particular school of adolescent philosophy and thought sought a grand unified theory, everything all at once, and a cigarette afterward.

Ann chose her words very carefully. “When was the last time you guys were all together?”

“All of us?” A full quorum? I had to think.

Perhaps that first summer after high school? The Canadiens were unbeatable, the Expos very beatable, the Stones were still relevant, Springsteen was on the rise and Bowie was immersed in his brilliant Berlin phase. Video games had just been domesticated, lassoed in the wilds of the downtown arcades; you could play Pong in your friend’s rec room. What I do know is that it was that instant before the cosmic phone rang (no local area code required): the big world calling up about real life. Somebody spilled the Drambuie and it ran in all directions.

All six of us were incredibly fortunate in that we were able to choose our colleges and universities, choose the places where we wished to live and pursue our careers in our chosen industries. This gang, this cell of camaraderie, has continued to exist through the decades in rotating fragments of pairs, trios, quartets and quintets. One of us would always have news about one or more of the others. And the internet changed us as it did everything else; it’s so easy these days to stay in touch with friends who would help me not just move house but move a body.

And I can imagine that scenario. Pizza and beer after the job was done wouldn’t be good enough for John and Jacques, they’d want pot. Tim would inform me that we need proper steel spades to dig, not my plastic snow shovels. Jim would worry about hitting a gas line or sewer pipe. Marty would remember to bring a flashlight and bag of quicklime because he’d assume, correctly, that I hadn’t thought of them. And my friends would all be annoyed I hadn’t set up an iPod and a Bose dock.

Ann continued, “Maybe you should try to organize a reunion?”

“Me? I love those guys and I miss them, but it would be like herding cats. Everybody’s all over the country and John’s in Mexico. It would take a year of planning, at least. Everybody’s busy. Everybody’s always busy. People these days need a month’s notice for a happy hour beer. And where? Montreal’s too obvious and, anyways, it’s changed a lot. Nobody would ever agree on a place: ‘I’m not going there.’ I might as well suggest Palestine. It’s pointless.”

Ann said, “You know, if you wait too long, your next reunion could be a funeral, and you’ll be one short.”

Truth. And doesn’t life sometimes get in the way of living? Life’s like a marketing pitch from one of those credit cards named for a precious metal: aspirational promises in capital letters and then paragraphs of mouse type caveats, exceptions, asterisks and daggers; nobody I’ve ever known has led a life as advertised. And here we were, me and my old friends, all of us in our sixties now and a little worse for wear and tear, but each of us somehow fortunate enough to have the means for a reunion somewhere if we wanted it.

I’m uncertain as to how to grade my life’s regrets. What’s worse, the stuff I did or the stuff I didn’t do? There was some casual Group of Six social media chatter near winter’s end: “I’d love to see all you guys again.” “Maybe we should meet in Vegas?” Let’s do lunch. I anted up my borrowed two cents: “Ann says if we don’t do this sooner than later…” Radio silence: “Broadsword calling Danny Boy, come in.” And then a message transmitted to the receivers. Jim had arbitrarily picked the dates to “meet ‘neath that giant Exxon sign.” All the hep cats formed a line and suddenly things went reel to reel like the opening scenes of a heist flick or an 8-track play of that Thin Lizzy song.

Saturday Jim, John, Jacques and I will converge on Palm Springs; I’ve never been to California. Tim and Marty to follow the next day, and the one after that; not Sunday or Monday because time’s going to become a little fluid, elastic through the holy desert days and nights. We will retell our old stories with all the inherent flaws of faulty memories. But the main thing in the here and now is that together we will write new ones.

Man, how we fell about the place.           

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of time travel since 2053. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers. 

A FAN’S NOTES

Gordon Lightfoot 1938 - 2023

There was a time when a hit song wasn’t manufactured pap. I bought my first Gordon Lightfoot album in 1974 because the title track of Sundown was beyond addictive. I had a lot of growing up to do before I realized just how nasty the lyrics were as sung by the mean drunk of a narrator. Lightfoot had always been in our house, in my big sister’s record collection, Lightfoot release dates going back to 1966. Sometime in the late 90s when I was living in Calgary, my brother, in from Edmonton, and I were killing time together downtown although I can’t remember the circumstances. I nodded toward the HMV store and said, “Do you mind if we pop in?” My brother’s musical tastes weren’t strictly Memphis and Motown, but earnest white folkies with precise Presbyterian pronunciation were definitely not his bag, papa. He walked out with Lightfoot’s Complete Greatest Hits on the Rhino boutique label. Well, I never…

Lightfoot has always been there. There like the Thousand Islands or the Rockies, part of the landscape, a page in an atlas of Canada. I swear to God he’s cited in The Penguin History of Canada and I’m sure he’s standing sideways, concealed behind the jack pine, in Tom Thomson’s painting. He seems an eternal constant because he never strayed very far from his groove. He never went “electric” and if he ever got entirely sober, there was never a “born again” phase. Folk music is the people’s music which is why it’s always been around and isn’t going anywhere. Lightfoot sang our stories; he was our “rainy day” troubadour. And I prefer that epithet because words like “icon” and “legend” whose meanings have been diluted through overly liberal application don’t seem to cut it now. I suppose the annoying “Canadian” modifier still applies because Lightfoot was quite content to stay home.

And there’s Lightfoot’s catalogue of songs. They almost strike me as some ethereal national birthright and yet not a single one has sunk to shorthand Canuck cliché unlike say Stompin’ Tom’s “The Hockey Song.” When my family and friends celebrate my death I hope they start the party with “Old Dan’s Records,” a bluegrass jig, and then pull out all of mine and dance all night or at least until two or three on gritty cinders of me. It’s fun to hear the old time songs.

Well the liquor tasted good and the women all were fast. The missed flight in “Early Morning Rain” is westward bound. In my mind it’s west to east perhaps because I’ve always imagined “Alberta Bound” didn’t quite work out for the young stranger. Like the deceptively titled “Carefree Highway,” “Early Morning Rain” is about self-inflicted wounds, loss and longing. Good times in the big town not only cost the price of a plane ticket but ultimately the haven of home and the embrace of loved ones. Not an uncommon theme. What slays me is a rueful aside, a grudging acknowledgment of changing times: You can’t jump a jet plane like you can a freight train. Down and out is getting harder than ever before (I consider the Rheostatics’ “Bad Time to Be Poor” obtusely obvious but these inflationary times have prompted reconsideration). Nowadays panhandling raises “a pocketful of sand” because nobody carries cash.

From “Ribbon of Darkness” to “Black Day in July” or “If You Could Read My Mind” to “Circle of Steel,” the Lightfoot universe is filled with dark matter. There are no Inco/stinko “Sudbury Saturday Night” gag rhymes. Lightfoot plumbs the depths of Lake Superior and shivers in the chilly shadows of the Canadian Shield, boreal forest. Canadian culture, still coming of age, and increasingly and refreshingly diverse, hasn’t many touchstones that soar above the lowest common denominator exercise in nostalgia that is Hockey Night in Canada and Canadian Tire catalogues or defy facile “our version of” comparisons. Gordon Lightfoot is not Canada’s Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan; Lightfoot, flawed and complex, is Lightfoot, both a chronicler and character in our ever-evolving national dream.       

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source Canadiana since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers.