At dusk, clouds congregate on the horizon and cars exit Highway 303 at Bell Rd. to go to Surprise, Arizona.
It is quitting time for those who still have a job to go too.
In Surprise, brother Alan and I are staying at the Happy Trails Resort but it could just as well be Tumbleweed Acres, the Paradise River Resort, the Leaping Lizard RV Park, or the Frontier Horizons. There are plenty of places in Surprise for people to pull RV’s, buy homes to fit their budgets, or stay in planned parks with clubhouses, libraries, ballrooms, swimming pools and saunas. In the deserts of Arizona there are plenty of developer escapades to worry about ,and, according to a yesterday’s local news article, plenty of land fraud cases to keep a team of corporate lawyers busy.
On the off ramp at Bell Road, we are just another car in line, waiting to make a left, continue down Bell Rd till we see our Happy Trails Resort, stop at a security gate and get waved through by a security guard, a middle aged park tenant making extra money to pay his monthly space rent.
Sunset is on the way, and,as it spreads, the sky becomes streaks of pink with textures reminding me of Van Gogh;s ” Starry Night. “.
The End of the World has been on my mind lately.
There are enough bad toys around the world to exterminate us all.
Staying off the internet and staying uninformed is a smart thing to do.
When Rome burns, you want to be out of town.
Interstate 10 from Surprise to the Phoenix airport is slowed to six miles per hour at seven in the morning.
Our clock is ticking and our plane departure time is absolute.
Alan and I exit the freeway and head south to Buckhorn Avenue at 51st street, then east towards the airport. With detours, and uncertainty, we end at the airport and find the Terminal 4 parking garage, slide into a small space for my compact car that I drove to Happy Trails from Albuquerque, and get ourselves to the American Airlines check in desk. We meet Dave, who drove in from Denver, in the Phoenix airport, and board together a flight to Mazatlan, Mexico.
On the airplane, all the way to Mexico, there is the back of a head looking at me. I keep trying to visualize it with eyes, a nose, a mouth, a personality. But, it is just a thatch of graying hair holding up a set of earphones. To my left is a porthole window whited out by the sun.
Alan tries to catch up on sleep in the window seat. Dave is seated in the front of the plane. He hates flying and had to bring oxygen because of COPD.
After two hours we three land in Mexico and have to endure still another security screening.
This is a price you pay for being warm when back home people are wearing heavy jackets and shoveling snow.
Being deemed no security threat, we catch a cab to our hotel, change into shorts, and watch palm trees sway in the breeze above a cool blue swimming pool as babes turn into bronze statues.
Up to now we have just been talking Mexico. Now, we are doing Mexico.
Another foreign country is getting into Scotttreks, this time with company
Surprise, Arizona didn’t start where it is today.
Back in the day there wasn’t much here but tumbleweeds, cactus, rugged mountains, ranches, farms, a few dirt roads and lots of dreams.
The Happy Trails Resort was once nothing but a set of plans for RV lots, park models, a clubhouse and pool, and a golf course. It is now a place for those who have achieved the American dream to move to the desert from cold states that don’t see much sun in the winter. It has become a place for relaxation, socializing, barbecues, dances and ice cream socials.
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans lent this resort their aura and promoted it. In the Chuck wagon dining room, off in a lonesome corner, is a display of mannequins wearing authentic costumes worn by Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, and cowboy memorabilia from an era when Roy Rogers was as big a star as Hollywood could create.
Looking at the costumes one is struck by how small a man Roy Rogers was, and how petite a woman was Dale Evans.
Watching them ride the range on TV they looked larger than life.They fought evil on every episode and there was always time for a song around a campfire with the boys, a helpful hand for neighbors and friends. In the end, bad guys got what they deserved and good prevailed. Their costumes seem flamboyant, even now, but cowboy’s have a style all their own.
Happy Trails is more than a song and more than a resort.
It is a philosophy. It is a wish for good luck, a wish for the best for all, a hope that at the last roundup we really all will meet again under the best of circumstances, under a broad starry sky with a roaring campfire to gird us against the cold, some hot coffee and tasty jerky for a meal, and a good blanket to throw over us as we nestle our head against a saddle.
At one time Hollywood gave us real heroes, real role models. Now, life has become more gray, more conflicted, more questioning, more rebellious, more edgy.
Looking at Roy and Dale, I resolve to dig out a few old colorized westerns.
I resolve to eat buttered popcorn and think about the fall of Rome.
There is, at some point, a line whereby good taste moves into bad.
There are value meters operating in everyone’s head at any given time with rating needles moving from one to ten, good to bad, up or down simultaneously within many categories. The Happy Trails Resort is above 5 but less than 10 on most of my scales.
Yard decorations at Happy Trails, however, score ten and a half..
There are carved wooden bears that welcome you with open arms. There are pink flamingos that have eschewed the Florida Everglades for dry desert vistas. There are little plastic ducks circling the inside of birdbaths. There is Golf Ball Man waiting for his next shot, cow skulls painted like a woman’s nails, plastic flower gardens, wooden birds whose tails rotate as wind direction changes. Makeshift clotheslines reach across carports and golf carts are pulled into driveways as the preferred mode of transportation. Such devil may care decorating brings the best and worst from Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Oregon, Washington, California.
Saquaro cactus stand tall and in the evenings look like silent sentinels waiting for an Indian attack. There are stories from residents of bobcat sightings and unwary house cats being carried off in the clamped jaws of coyotes, never to be seen again.
Ages here hover around 70 and real estate signs pepper each street.
Few snowbirds stay through the summer with heat over a hundred and ten degrees. Those that do come out only in early morning or late evening. The rest of the day they spend checking stock portfolios, calling kids and grand kids, and fixing light meals in microwave ovens.
When you get old you don’t want to move randomly or carelessly.
You want to hunker down in a gated community and keep a loaded pistol on your nightstand.
I-10 takes you to Los Angeles if you stay on it all the way.
Out of Wilcox, Arizona the Interstate takes you along a steadily winding uphill road that goes from long flat expanses to foothills and into rugged mountains. Several miles before you get to Texas Canyon, a collection of rock formations that look like a group of dinosaur’s ridged backs, you come to a ghost town called Stein’s. There is a faded billboard promoting the place that has survived highway beautification and Ladybird Johnson.
Usually Stein’s has just been a glance to my right and is passed by. There is nothing here but old wood cabins, rusted machines, cactus, barbed wire fences and trailers for people who want to live away from other people because it is easier that way.
I drive over an overpass, follow a gravel road that ends at a closed chain link gate. There is a sign with red lettering that says the place is closed and two men inside the fence today are burning weeds and trying to get the best of their rakes and shovels.
“You closed?”
“They are,” one says, suspicious of my intentions.
“Good place for a movie shoot.”
“They did a few here,” comes a grunt, “but the highway noise makes it hard. Kills the sound man. ”
“Is the Museum open?”
“No, the owner’s husband was murdered here and it has been closed four years. She doesn’t know what she is going to do. ”
When a place has a population of two and one gets murdered you have devastation.
My love affair with Stein’s ends as quick as it began and I pull back out on the Interstate with relief, glad to leave the two prisoners to their work detail.
Stein’s is now in my rear view mirror and its history is sad.
It is just another comma in a long winded Faulkner novel where people are born, live, and die while moss grows thick in the trees and the difference between humans and animals is only razor thin.
Outside the Happy Trails Resort, to the southwest, is a nature preserve named the White Tank Mountains.
Whereas Surprise is a continuation of development, an encroachment upon the desert, the White Tank Mountains are resolutely clinging to nature. Within fifteen miles of Surprise, this preserve takes you into wilderness with some modern conveniences. There are picnic areas, a winding loop road that returns you to the visitor center, RV spaces for rent, clean bathrooms. Some of the trails are okay for patrons in wheelchairs or using canes, and on other trails you see mountain bikes, horseback riding, and hikers.
Leaving the visitor center and driving into the park, there is a pull off place for active souls who like to run, ride bikes, horseback, train for athletic events. This time of morning, on a weekday, there are only two cars in the parking lot when brother Alan and I pull in.
Walking the trail, it isn’t hard to imagine grizzled prospectors leading a donkey deep into the mountains looking for precious metals. It isn’t hard to imagine ranchers chasing down cattle or Indians fighting troops stationed at old time forts.
There are still places you can disappear in Arizona.
Staying on Pathways has always been difficult for me, but I am not the only one who has trouble walking a straight line.
Brothers keep us grounded by knowing who we used to be.
Golf and sunshine walk hand in hand in Arizona in 2015 like a retired couple on a perpetual honeymoon.
The Happy Trails RV Resort surrounds a golf course and its golf holes wind through the development like a snake doing a break dance. The greens are good but fairways need attention with new owners cutting doglegs to trim overhead and maximize profit.
Walking down streets named Trigger, Spur, Lariat, there are yard decorations in abundance.
In a golfing area, one is not surprised to find Golf Ball Man, a curious combination of super sized golf ball cells held together with wire skin and topped off with a driver, golf cap, sunglasses, and a determined look.
He shoots under par, sinks thirty foot down hill putts, has no trouble with sand shots, drives like a twisting desert dervish. If you ask him, he will tell you you have to give him five shots a nine plus one mulligan an eighteen. He can up the bet on the eighteenth hole if he chooses, and you can’t tee up your ball in the fairway.
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans are patron saints of this place but Golf Ball Man says his prayers in the pews.
At night I hear golf ball man practicing his putting, and, whistling, ” When the Saints, Go Marching in….. ”
Victoria Gardens is a Rancho Cucamonga mall, one of many in the Los Angeles area where shopping ranks high on people’s to do lists.
The day before Christmas, late afternoon, crowds are thinning. By now, most have their shopping complete and are winding home to pack, wrap, tie bows, slip their gift under a tree or drop it into a red sock hanging from fake fireplace mantles. On the outside wall of a mall store, the California Soul Records marquee is a synopsis of California.
The surf is here. The palm trees are here. The image of carefree living is here. The surfer is here. The feeling of comfort, washed out shirts and denims, short sleeves and caps is here. The effects of unlimited sun, salt, air, and wind have worked the images on the painted brick wall into something as comfortable as your favorite pair of shorts.
There might not have been a California Soul Records, but if there wasn’t, there should be.
This afternoon, Chris and I take photos for our future albums with this wall in the background.
When you are an imaginary recording star, with California Soul Records , looks are everything.
This afternoon I imagine Andy Warhol opening a can of Campbell soup, grasping it with a pair of channel locks,and warming it on a can of sterno by a Christmas tree on Wall Street
Finishing 2014 on the road, most of my past year didn’t end up on scotttreks, and that is good.
When I tuck a past year into the scrapbook, I’m okay if most of it doesn’t wake up again.
Your chariot has to be tuned up to keep you in the Los Angeles race.
You aren’t going to get anywhere in this L.A. burg without a good set of wheels, a team of rested and well fed horses, and enough time to get where you are going through a maze of interconnected freeways, on and off ramps, incorporated towns that remind you of a patchwork quilt with each town independent but linked to the others to make a California dreaming quilt.
It is almost a forty minute drive to Los Angeles to reach Chris’s mechanic.
Ontario, where Chris and his mom live, is fifty miles from the Pacific Ocean, the Getty Museum, Staples Center, Sunset Strip, Hollywood, the Walk of Fame, and other landmarks. His car’s CHECK engine light is on and fan belts, recently replaced, are slipping and making a squeal..It isn’t something any garage can’t fix but when you get a mechanic you trust, you will grudgingly drive the hour to let him work his car magic on your car.
The Auto Care Center,when we pull in, is busting open at the seams with car hoods up, tires off, doors open, uniformed grease junkies busily removing and replacing parts, running computer checks, calling parts suppliers. It is the day before Christmas and cars are doing what they invariably do – break down.
Chris’s car belts are tightened and his check engine light turns out to be caused by not tightening down on the gas cap enough so a seal is broken and escaping emissions trigger a sensor.
On the way back to Ontario we stay off the freeways.
Chris, who cared for my dad and Roseanne, in California, was exceedingly fond of my Dad.
California was never a place my dad wanted to be, and, at the end, he wasn’t.
Chris and I still have plenty of J.L. stories, and all of them make us smile, to tell, even when they don’t have happy endings.
The shopping mall is not only a metaphor for the Christmas season, but a melody.
Jingle bells ring from inside closed stores as a security pickup patrols and deliveries are made to the back door. Stores open at ten in the morning and stay open till ten in the evening.
Palm trees and oranges mark this territory as Southern California but this shopping mall could also be in Arizona or parts of Nevada, Texas, or even Florida. Malls, once a new concept, brought customers out of neighborhood stores to shop in retail fantasy lands, closed down mom and pop places that had higher prices but kept neighborhoods together. Malls gave big business a chance to grab market share, streamline operations, centralize and advertise their brand. They changed America.
Christmas is promoted here as far as my eyes can see. Windows have nativity scenes, garlands are draped over light poles, decorated trees have presents wrapped underneath, snowflakes are sprayed on windows.
The last time Los Angeles saw a real snowflake was when Hell froze over.
High on a ladder, a painter keeps up appearances.
In California, there is no room for wrinkles, sags, or cracks.
California dedicates herself to the pursuit of Dionysus and when Santa rolls into town with his reindeer, real soon, he will be wearing yellow speedo’s, a bright red stocking cap, and a pair of dark sunglasses that would make a gangster proud.
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