Woke up within a different four walls. Dennis and I drove out to Palm Desert for four days and it’s been interesting to notice the different mood pandemic travel brings: a cocktail of familiar (relaxing into unstructured days, curiosity around seeing/hearing things completely new) with an obvious chaser of caution (covid checklist). The place we’re staying is a resort we used to frequent when we’d come to visit my dad. So this one-bedroom apartment with balcony, view of a pool and golf course is a place where we’re self-sufficient, no contact with other people, but we get a nice view of what’s going on around us. Although for sure watching people play golf (some with masks, most not) and lay by pools (masks abound. go, humans!) is not action-packed, which is the point really. Last night two families with a caboodle of kids (9) checked in catercorner to our place and my mind went to roads not taken.

Roads. We rode on some yesterday. To Joshua Tree where we stopped by the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Museum of Assemblage Sculpture, wow, that’s a mouthful, but also it’s an amazing eyeful. Noah was an artist who lived in LA and Joshua Tree and whose earliest sculpture was formed from the charred debris of the 1965 Watts Riot. The sculptures in his Joshua Tree location, where he worked during the latter part of his life, are both whimsical and socially relevant, even—or maybe especially—seventeen years after his death. To have the stillness of the desert juxtaposed with his found-object sculptures that make comment on how the world is both chaos and created-interesting from what is found all around, the perceptions of one person’s beauty next to what might be another’s discarded moment, was fascinating. Once we rode into Joshua Tree National Park proper, the difference between how nature, when left to its devices, is about as bananas as humans in presenting things astounding to the world. Seriously, it was like riding onto the moon. At any moment I expected Barbarella to step out from behind one of the massive rock formations. Trees like stick figures with very serious spiny bits on top in sharp relief to giant boulders alongside drip-sandcastle-looking moments. Over and over I kept thinking, so small, I am. So tiny in this place, which I imagine is the view most/many national forests bring about. That adjective majestic had to come from somewhere. And while I’m more water than sand when it comes to love of location, the solitude of the place wrapped around me in a peaceful way.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

I used to play a game when I was young sitting in the backseat as we’d drive through a neighborhood or on the freeway. I’d look out at the houses or cars and wonder who people were and what they were up to. Now the game has changed slightly. As we rode through various locales: Joshua Tree, Mecca (yes, a city), rubbed up against the Salton Sea, through Coachella, I wondered, what would it be like to live here? How would I move and shake? Joshua Tree, the town, offered a yoga-toned, earth-tuned type of citizen, Mecca more agricultural seeming, in Coachella I watched a Greyhound pull out of the bus terminal headed for El Paso, Texas, and we watched a man, his bike tipped over near the road, pulling something from the train tracks as a freight train headed toward him. Yes, the train was literally bearing down. He got out of the way. Who knows what he was grabbing or if it worked. A young woman going to the laundromat, a line outside the drive-through CVC.

Snippets of life. people going about their day. and us heading back to a room to have no plans for the moment. All good. The sense of limbo reminding me that nothing’s permanent and that actually feels as good as it does strangely huge. Speaking of, we also happened to pass an elephant (fake. red) pulled happily from the back of a pickup truck. What kind of life might that be?