Remi (brown poodle brat) and I are driving to Death Valley to take pictures of the Geminids meteor shower. We left Saturday morning. We spent Saturday night at a truck stop in Valentine Nebraska, our camper truck parked in a line of idling semis, a sort of bring-your-own-sleeper-cab bunkhouse. The truck stop had a McDonalds and I had an Egg McMuffin. I didn’t tell Remi, although I think he was suspicious.
We left Valentine at 5:30 Sunday morning headed west driving Nebraska Highway 20 which runs along the state’s northern border. Good road, cliffs and buttes and curves in unlikely juxtaposition to movie-set ranch scenes and vastnesses where the prairie meets the horizons all around. It’s a beautiful, beautiful part of our country.
But in the morning, driving into the western dark, you can’t see the towering sand and stone geologies or the grazing cattle in the pine-treed and hilly distances or the snowy, hay-bale dotted expanses, all you can see is the headlight tunnel and the road and the hood and the blue, white and red gauges.
For many miles Sunday morning, the planet Mars, thirty degrees above the horizon and winking red, aligned exactly with the dashed white center line of west Highway 20 and the furthest reaches of our headlight beams while in those same moments, I watched in my mirrors as the eastern sky behind us turned red to blue. And the only sound was the murmur of the diesel and the gossipy whispers of the tires to the asphalt.
In the quiet, I thought about life being so quick and jerky and that it’s in these moments when fate and good fortune put us between the stars and the sun, that joy and peace are relearned.
I grew up in Del Mar, California, a little beach town just north of San Diego. I was born in 1956 and so was just gaining consciousness in the late sixties, early seventies. The Monkees are on my sound track. Del Mar wasn’t Berkeley but it wasn’t hick, either. Today, Interstate 5 hauls the vast majority of goods and people in and out of San Diego but in those days, the PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway, Highway 1, was the major north-south thoroughfare and all that traffic went right through Del Mar which at the time had two stoplights, 3999 friends and neighbors and me, and a decent break at the Eleventh Street beach.
This is a story about Gabriel and Judy and their business making and selling white cotton robes out of a shop in Del Mar. It was a little light blue stucco store front, east side of the highway facing west toward the ocean, a big window for displaying the robes, a laundromat next door, a little office above, half a dozen parking spots in front.
Gabe and Judy’s business plan was to ride the wave of the biggest menswear style-makeover in all of history; men, and also women, were at the same moment, any moment now, going to realize the inherent superiority of the white, all-cotton, calf-length, long-sleeve one-piece robe and throw off their rigid, socially conformist, uncomfortable, unhealthy, expensive, environmentally ruinous, flammable, uniform-of-the-man garb in favor of the wear anywhere and everywhere, always in fashion, You-Are-The-Power cotton robe. Gabe and Judy wore robes throughout their daily lives to show how truly comfortable and free they, the robes, were. Gabe and Judy were in their twenties and thin and had good hair so it made sense. Also, Jesus wore a robe. I don’t know what Gabe and Judy wore when they went to the bank. I never went to the bank with them.
While the robe hasn’t happened yet from a fashion standpoint, I do think their plan had merit. And they did teach me some things about business. Their primary new store, go-to-market initiative was to offer free homemade hand-cranked ice cream on Friday nights with a little open house so that the local moms and dads — college professors, engineers, navy pilots, our parents, you know, robe-types — would have some ice cream and try on a robe. Well shit, there were a dozen kids, ten to fourteen years old that I hung out with in that little town with no movie theater and within hours the Robe Shop had become the place to be on Friday night. And we’d make it an event, taking turns cranking and eating ice cream out of cones and paper bowls and coming up with new flavor ideas, strawberry, raspberry, banana, mango, apple (didn’t work very well). We suggested candy bars but Gabe and Judy were purists. Yet, despite all the fruit, heavy cream and cranking, no parents ever showed up. In fact, nobody I knew or ever heard of ever bought a robe from the Robe Shop. Nobody. Ever. But their ice cream was spectacular. From that I learned a couple of things about business; first, you can’t sell a bad idea with good ice cream, and second, good ice cream is really a good thing.
Another thing Gabe and Judy taught me about being successful in business was the importance of a diverse revenue stream. It seems they’d discovered this new market opportunity where guys who’d just run the border from Tijuana hauling weed often needed to liquidate a little product to fund their ride north. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to be carrying a lot of cash in that illegal border-crossing business. Small, independent guys, guys hauling half-a-dozen, maybe a dozen keys, would pull into one of the parking spots in front of the Robe Shop and walk out with some twenties and a friendly wave from Judy at the office window. She paid a hundred bucks a key. Sure, Grade A Mexican, you’d get twice that in the Bay Area, easy, but you ain’t in the Bay Area, Bro, the Bay Area’s five hundred miles north and you need gasoline and maybe something to eat to get you there. Gabe and Judy would break those bricks up and put the weed in baggies and sell lids, four fingers for ten bucks. Judy sold most of the weed to the rich kids in La Jolla, although some stayed in town. Gabe bragged to me once about all the money they were making. They disappeared after a couple of months. The robes just weren’t selling.
In Death Valley, there is no obvious wildlife, no insects, a buzzing fly every hour or so is an occasion. Aside the fly, the silence is not complete; a steady ideology of military war planes doing war plane things keeps the roar dull and constant. Sometimes the soundtrack is accompanied by an air show.
For breakfast, I had oatmeal. I threw in some golden raisins and mixed nuts and Leaves of Grass to bulk it up. There’s something about the desert that cracks open the mind to language; maybe it’s the scarcity of words, or the arid, hard-edged reality all around reminding you that life is brief and precarious, or maybe it’s just the thin, dry air. That’s not what this is about, but there it is.
My photos are diminished by my wretched technologies. The telescope is controlled by my phone, but doesn’t connect readily to my phone or disconnects from my phone or randomly makes me “observer” rather than “controller” or disagrees about passwords or some such random annoyance. Got some shots anyway.
I bought an old camera from a friend (hey, Paul) and had it modified for astro. Oh, happy me! The super hydrogen-sensitive sensor is washing my pics red; still red at lower ISOs but maybe useable. I shot a bunch. We’ll see.
But here’s the thing, when you lean your head back in your camping chair so that you’re staring straight up and the sky is flooded with stars and you can feel their photons that have travelled tens or hundreds of lightyears to pass through the lenses of your eyes and your skin and pour into your body so you’re filled with the light of eternity, the fucking trophy photos just don’t matter.
