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.