Marina Del Rey, CA to Kingman, AZ
I sleep in until about 8:30AM and wake to find that Mieko has already left for work. I take a few minutes to stretch, meditate, organize my belongings, and shower. I often take for granted how amazingly therapeutic a shower really is. For something like twenty minutes I just stand there and let the hot water saturate every nook and cranny and crevice and let my mind go blank. I’m in no rush, I have no destination, and today will be a long day of driving. As I stand there warm and wet and naked I note just how intimate bathing is. Everyone does it almost every day (well, most people, not sure about Coke-bottoms) and we all know everyone else starts or ends their day this way. Every day we find ourselves in this profoundly vulnerable state of being wet and naked to clean off the dirt and oils and smells the body naturally acquires. What would happen if someone were to lose all shame and self-consciousness associated with being naked and accept it as a normal state of affairs? What would happen if we all did? Nudist colonies and spontaneous group sex I guess. Scratch that—I'd hope.
Not likely, though, given the precedent of public springs and Turkish baths in Europe and Asia where at one time sexuality was not quite so terrifying and threatening to the social order. Group baths, shared vulnerability, a pathway to intimacy a little like self and social disclosure? Could be. What might I be disclosing to the world through my ink and piercings and shaving habits? My for really real self no doubt.
I clean myself up and pack up the car eager to get a jump on the desert heat. I’m planning to go leisurely and take the long way through the twists up to Oatman, AZ which I skipped after Kingman in an effort to make up for lost time. As I pull out of the hotel parking lot to take the expressway to Santa Monica Boulevard it occurs to me that Mieko mentioned there was a classic car shop around the corner, a place with some Bentleys and Cobras parked out front. I’m eager to check this place out; hopefully I can find the owner and get a few tips about handling the desert heat.
Circling the block a few times trying to find the shop, out of nowhere the voice of my friend Kareim pops into my head. “Dude this is ridiculous,” he says, “this whole car obsession of yours is a complete waste.” Kareim’s type-A tendencies make him a man who has never done anything for its own sake. Kareim is all business, even in his personal life. He’s goal directed. He plans his vacations to the hour; if he’s going to snorkel in the Bahamas he prepays the shop two weeks before he arrives so he’s got his slot and they damn sure better have room for him. “I mean you don’t even know where you’re going to spend the night tonight,” he continues. “And when are you going to be home? You already run up ridiculous bank fees. You didn’t anything worthwhile in L.A.—hell what was the point of coming here if you don’t run up to Hollywood? What’s your outcome? What did you get, or do, or make while you were there? And cars, Christ buy a picture book for Borders and save the gas money! You blew this trip, man,” he discloses. “Drive out here—in a shoddy broken-down car that you have to keep fixing, no less—to spend one day then turn around. What fun is that? Dumbass.”
Not wanting to argue with the voice in my head, I listen to Kareim’s take on my trip in an effort to understand him. He’s right of course. The trip has been inefficient. I didn’t make the most of L.A. I did have to stop too much and work on the car. I could have planned this out and been far less wasteful with my cash. Hell if I really wanted to be efficient I’d have flown to L.A. and spent two weeks in a rental out here. This driving jazz is hardly an efficient method to transport human bodies across great distances. I accept all the facts. The only part I dispute is the idea I’m not having fun. On the contrary, my nonexistent friend, I’m having a blast!
Oh, there it is. I find the car shop and it’s a dealership rather than a garage. No problem, maybe they’ll let me poke around and get some pictures. I go inside Chequered Flag International, a dealer of just about everything. Once inside I see some amazing vehicles: a gorgeous old Jaguar E-type, an early 1950s Chrysler, a 1960 Rolls Royce. Beautiful cars. I introduce myself to Dave at the sales desk, explain the road trip and ask if I can take a few pictures. He tells me to go ahead as he takes a call. Dave is sporting a vintage motorcycle jacket and we get to talking while he’s on hold. He tells me he’s traveled all though California and Arizona along the old route. I get the feeling he’s Australian by his accent (although he might be an aspiring actor from Burbank waiting to be discovered); he comments on the pros and cons to traveling alone. I’ve been thinking about this more and more (not just that there exist pros and cons, that’s true of everything interesting in life, but what they are on this trip). When Mieko and I traveled I was a terrible traveling companion because of my seat-of-the-pants preference for adventure. But she was no walk in the park herself. I’m not sure how many times minor air travel inconveniences became the source of unlimited emotional drama for the two of us. One too many, obviously. I find myself thankful that on this trip I’m able to put my attention on the road and the car and my own thoughts. Instead of two hours of unbroken silence being awkward it’s entirely contemplative. Maybe next time I’ll bring someone along to shift the focus of my interest…or if I find an appealing young traveler maybe I’ll have a little drama toward the end of my trip. No sixty-year-old psychokiller hitchhikers though please. 
After leaving the shop I turn onto Lincoln and find a hand wash for ten bucks. “Oh my God,” Cherry begs, “can I have a shower?!? C’mon, you had one this morning, remember how refreshed it made you feel. I want them to clean my pipes.” Watch your language little lady, I think at her as I turn in and resist the cashier’s upsell. Business is brisk and the staff entirely Mexican which makes the economics of offering ten dollar hand washes out here more profitable. A lousy Chicago drive-through with plastic squeegees that beat the hell out of your paint job and tear off your radio antennas are eight bucks in most gas stations. A hand wash near my apartment is twenty five…then it suddenly occurs to me (not true) that Mexican immigrant labor in L.A. is probably abundant. Like massive oversupply abundant. And what happens when supply goes up and demand stays the same? Chicago economists remind us that prices fall. Or at least they do when no one like God or the government intervenes. What happens when there’s no demand for a good? Again, prices fall. That’s how I’m able to swing a forty dollar room for thirty dollars in the middle of nowhere Missouri at a motel run by an Indian immigrant family: something is better than nothing. Up to a point, though. At some point the fairness and resentment factor dominates consideration of cost and I’d rather tell you to go fuck yourself than do business with you.
They’ve done studies on how rational people are with money and it turns out we are, as a species, not all that rational. Consider a game where two players, A and B, are going to split ten dollars. Here are the rules: A offers B any amount, take it or leave it, from no money to all ten dollars. If B accepts they split the money. If B declines neither A nor B get anything. Rationally, if A offers B any amount other than zero B should take it. Think about it: If A says, “Here’s $1 for you and $9 for me,” B should probably say, “Okay, I guess $1 is better than nothing.” But statistically that’s not what happens. It turns out that below about $3 that B generally declines the offer and they both walk away with nothing. Why would this be? B has something like a fairness reserve price. That’s the minimum he or she will accept below which the issue of fairness dominates the practicality of having cash. You can think of it as the price B is willing to pay to screw A: the value of vindictive enforcement of fairness.
Now you‘d think that our big smart brains we’d learn to be happy with our lot and not worry about what our neighbor has going for him or her. You’d be wrong. It’s built into us, not just the species but the whole genus. A few years ago they conducted as study with a breed of South American monkeys to see whether fairness is innate to primates. Monkeys were trained in pairs to perform menial tasks like fetch rocks and other objects in exchange for food. This requires training because most primates object to relinquishing objects once they have them in hand (think of your little brother’s light saber…or your own goddamn Blackberry). After being conditioned to accept cucumbers as a reward, the cruel researchers mixed up the game. In each pair, one of the monkeys continued to receive cucumbers for their labor and the other was rewarded with grapes. Unequal pay for equal work, anyone? Well socialists aren’t the only species bothered by this idea. Almost instantly upon seeing the unfair reward of their neighbor the monkeys earning cucumbers refused to cooperate with the researchers, often hurling cucumbers back through the cage door as if to say “Take this job and shove it!”
Look, if a monkey can become indignant at what it perceives to be unfair treatment, and so can I, I have to wonder if my sense of indigence is all that emotionally sophisticated. I almost have to laugh at myself when I get angry and think “I’ve been wronged—I feel like throwing cucumbers!” Of course we aren’t simply monkeys, we take context and status and privilege into account, so when I see an immigrant willing to do a job for a wage I wouldn’t accept I may say “That’s unfair,” or I may say “That’s the market setting a price.” Each of these statements fundamentally constitutes social disclosure.
Regardless of the socioeconomic implications of hardwired fairness for the species, ten bucks for a carwash is a great deal. Cherry comes out of the rinse conveyor feeling clean and refreshed and a team of half a dozen guys descend on her as she’s stroked, rubbed, massaged, and pampered. They crawl inside her, working her interior and steaming up the windows at first until they squirt this liquid and gently swab all the way from front to back. Her headlights, hubcaps, rear end all gleam in the morning SoCal sun.
I love my car. I would have sex with her if I could figure how not to permanently scar myself. There, I said it.
“Nice car mister,” comes the compliment from the lead attendant as I collect my keys. “Oooh, that felt good,” Cherry intones as I get inside and turn her over. “But watch yourself—I saw you flirting with those two blonds waiting in line.” “You don’t own me,” I respond as I turn on the radio and head toward Santa Monica Boulevard.
L.A. was fun, much more of a layover than a destination. Reaching the end of the route gave me a brief sense that I accomplished something, like reaching a milestone birthday or celebrating a minor promotion with a trip to the bar with coworkers. It’s nice, it feels good, but you keep going. You 
haven’t arrived. Driving down Santa Monica Boulevard now makes me more restless to get out of the city than I expected. I love this place; it’s just not where I want to be right now. I want to jumpstart the journey and get back on the Mother Road. Every couple of blocks I pass a neat retro diner that looks straight out of 90210 or a fun nostalgic roadside neon sign until I finally find a pale brown city sign reading “Historic Route 66.” Finally, some proof of my arrival…I need a picture of this. I set up a nice shot of Cherry on the boulevard and ask a passerby to get us together. This feels strangely more satisfying than my shots down at the pier because it reconnects me with the signs I’ve been following across the country. Like a book you stopped reading halfway through, engrossed though you were, and just never picked back up, I’m following a familiar thread.
Traffic is a bitch. I follow Santa Monica Boulevard as far as the 405 (which takes half an hour) and cut my losses, getting on the freeway headed for the 10 back to San Bernardino. So I’ll miss the Hollywood drag and some of the retro neon. I can always plan an efficient trip to L.A. and fly. Maybe I’ll bring Kareim so he can criticize my ambiguous exploration. (“Seriously, dude, what’s the goal of today? What are we going to accomplish?” “I don’t know, see what we see and enjoy ourselves?” 
“Yeah, but how?!? Hang on let me respond to this text…”) Another half an hour down the road and I pass West Covina and the scene becomes familiar; I pass by shopping centers and car lots and city landmarks that caught my eye on the way in, this time midday instead of lit up at night. A familiar and satisfying sense of movement sweeps over me and I see why I was so restless in L.A.—since it wasn’t my destination, it was just a layover, I was biding my time and taking in the scenery but I wasn’t really present. It didn’t suit my stated purpose. But now that I’m back on the road it feels like I’ve got places to go and people to meet and things to see. There’s more future to follow than past to reflect on. As much as I like peace and stillness (sometimes…not very often), I don’t want it right now. I want to progress. I want to move. I want to drive. Just a week in and I’ve gotten used to it. I imagine a lifetime of the familiar. I imagine how uncomfortable I’d feel if after a lifetime of driving I were to suddenly stop. If after a lifetime of being self-absorbed I were to suddenly see myself as one of many. If after a lifetime of believing in the afterlife I were to suddenly face a crisis of faith. In engineering they recognize that it’s not the change that gets you, it’s the suddenness of the change. Smooth the acceleration and deceleration on the car so you don’t give the driver whiplash when she takes off or brakes. Slow down gracefully as the tram pulls into the station, unlike the el train that damn near throws you to the ground when it arrives at the platform. They call it “minimizing the jerk.” It’s not the change that gets our attention, we’re always changing all the time inside and outside whether we want to or not—its’ the suddenness of the change that we notice.
The stop and go bumper to bumper traffic does not minimize the jerk, especially not with these manual drum brakes. Climbing the hills up to San Bernardino I hit a noontime L.A. county traffic jam and realize I’m not going to fly through California at the speed of sound. While idling in traffic I notice Cherry getting hot again and remind myself that I need to take her at a reasonable speed until I can figure out how to solve the cooling problem. I suspect the thermostat is faulty or the fan needs to be looked at, but more than anything I don’t want to be stranded in the desert dry so I keep my eyes peeled for a Flying J or grocery store, someplace I can pull off and stock up on water. Traffic eases slightly over the next hour and I catch a few spots of level road along with quite a few steep ascents and sharp turns. Body roll, overheating, and engine fatigue make driving a forty year old car through the Mojave sound like not such a brilliant idea…at least not when I put it that way. Brilliance wasn’t any more the goal than efficiency had been but being safe isn’t too anal retentive. I find a Wal-Mart in Rancho Cucamonga and get six gallons of drinking water, two gallons of coolant, a box of protein bars, and a soda. Should keep both me and Cherry alive if she decides to break down somewhere near Kingman, AZ again. The checkout girl asks the person ahead of me,
“How are you today?” and the person grouses about nothing in particular under his breath. The checkout girl wears this apathetic smirk, bags the purchase and hands the guy his receipt. Great, I think, jaded little brat. “How are you today?” she asks when it’s my turn.
“Fantastic. I’m on the road headed for Arizona. That’s why all the water—probably shouldn’t drink it all at once.”
“Oh that’s cool,” she replies sincerely. “Up to Flagstaff or down to Phoenix?”
“Flagstaff. Hope to see an old ghost town.”
“That’s a good idea. You know there’s one out in…” she pauses and thinks. “Calico! It’s nice. Restored. You might want to check that out too.” I thank her for the tip and get ready to bag everything up and she says, “Sorry, you credit card’s been declined.”
“Oh,” I say and fish my Washington Mutual card from my pocket, “try this one.” It works fine and it occurs to me I better call Wells Fargo to see if I overdrew something else. I should have brought a credit card.
As I walk away I hear the checkout girl ask “How are you today?” to a terse, “Fine.” Nothing more. I suppose I have a chit chat gene that sometimes makes it easy for me to talk people up, but as I walk down the lot to the car something else occurs to me. It reminds me of Mieko, and myself quite often, this sort of emotional intensification. Not just reflection, not just reciprocation, but actual amplification. Mieko is very encouraging of encouragement, supportive of being supportive, accepting of acceptance; she’s also judgmental of judgment, gets angry around angry people, and is enervated by other people’s apathy. This goes by various labels like emotional contagion and escalation. Of course, the escalation comes from the actions in response to the emotion, not from the mere feeling itself. We all exhibit some degree of this, even if we identify with transient moods and claim “I’m a happy person” or “I’m a depressed person.” In my case I see it clearly: I love your love and I hate your hate. It doesn’t take much for me to sense a negative tone: a few well-placed “That sucks” or “I can’t stand this” and what I hear is, “I’m an irritable person who is irritated and I feel the irresistible urge to share my irritation with you.” That’s cool, of course, because we all feel irresistible urges for different things at different times; knowing that some of us in the world are emotional amplifiers might inform my choice of topic or frequency. If I ever choose to take an interest in the consequences of my words, actions, or attitudes on other human beings, that is.
Once I’m back on the road I fumble through my pockets and retrieve my Wells Fargo card, turn it over and call the number on the back. Might as well sort it out now so I don’t screw myself later, although my inner procrastinator wants to put it off until tonight. I get through to a voice menu which saves me the hassle of having to look and the phone and rear end the idiots who keep slamming on the brakes ahead of me. “This is Wells Fargo, may I have you credit card number,” chimes the phone banker on the other end. I go through the identity confirmation process and say, “You know, in the last day or so I transferred some money with a wire and withdrew cash at an L.A. ATM. I bet that looks a little fishy to you. Is my card restricted on suspected fraud?” The phone banker can’t answer that but he puts me in touch with the fraud investigation department. I’m not on hold for long before he comes back with a fraud agent who can help. “I know this is all for my own protection but I’m wondering if you can help me use my card again.” Of course, happy to help, the whole nine yards. I explain that I’m on this drive so I’d like not to trip their fraud wires if possible. “Can I, like, give you my itinerary for the next week? I don’t mind calling you up or anything, it’s just that I don’t talk to my family this much on the road.” The investigator is pleasant and professional and makes a note that I’ll be traveling until the end of the month so this should not happen again.
Satisfied, I drive past a billboard with monkeys on it and think more about monkey fairness and Kareim’s insistent nature. When my card was declined I was a little frustrated but I knew I had alternatives so my goal of getting some groceries and getting back on the road wasn’t blocked, just inconvenienced. And since I chatted up the checkout girl my impression management goal of not looking like a big impoverished dickhead wasn’t blocked either. I wasn’t too worked up about the whole incident. Kareim, on the other hand, would have been just insane. “What the fuck do you mean my card was declined?!? I just used it yesterday!!!” As if the checkout girl had some big vendetta to make Kareim’s life difficult. The social disclosure underlying such an episode something like “I’m a big irritable asshole and I can’t muster the decency to treat you like a person while I direct my emotions where it counts—taking responsibility for solving the problem.” A person discloses a lot about themselves by going on a tirade. Not good or bad things, not that they were abused as a child, not that they always and invariably respond by ranting (although with Kareim it’s a good bet). Simply that in this moment they are a giant irritable asshole.
We can always hope it’s a state and not a trait.
After the trouble at the store my next goal was to get my credit card working again. I could have called the phone banker and demanded they resolve this immediately, feeling some vague sense of unfair treatment. But somewhere along the way I picked up (from my mom I think) that one of the easiest ways to screw yourself is to take your frustration out on the person trying to help you. A good manager, in fact anyone with solid interpersonal skills, quickly learns that navigating bureaucracy involves keeping the goal clearly in mind while remaining flexible about the means. I’ve come to expect that even in a big bureaucracy like Wells Fargo, some fraud investigator named Sheila is willing to listen to me explain what I want and help me get it. It may mean calling back in 24 hours (what do I care?) and it may mean paying a slightly higher APR (fine if I’m going to settle at the end of the month); whatever I want I can generally get. And since Sheila isn’t the only person in the fraud investigation division, I might ask, politely but firmly, to talk with her manager if I don’t get what I need. Not, “Sheila you’re a real cow for not having been promoted to a level where you can make this work for me,” but “Sheila, thanks for your help. Nothing personal, but now I need the help of someone in the next pay grade.”
At 3:00PM I come upon the Calico ghost town in Yermo, CA that my Wal-Mart cashier suggested I check out. Not sure quite what to expect, I think I have a picture of an abandoned mine, maybe a few boarded up store fronts and a dead hotel. After all the ghost rest stops and roadside attractions I’ve seen along the route, when I hear ghost town I’m thinking dilapidated and abandoned. The Calico ghost town is well marked and sports a number of signs leading the intrepid tourist off the expressway up a short desert pass and down a narrow two lane road…up to a tollbooth. They charge to see an abandoned town? Strange, I think, but I pay the toll and pull into the parking lot. Abandoned it is not. The ghost town is a wonderful restoration, built on the bones of the original mining town that boomed in the 1880s and busted, stood abandoned for decades only to be carefully brought back to life with the sweat equity of people in the area who though it deserved preservation. Of course recognizing the profit potential is no fool’s accident. Once you find something of value, charging a fair price for it is the American way. I spend about an hour touring the old mine, walking in and out of the saloons (mostly in), hiking up the hill leading to the heart of the town, and talking with the gate staff about the car. Same old banter about the year, the drive, their classic car equivalents. Funny about having that same old banter is that it never seems to get old.
I think for a while about the idea of value being exemplified in the Calico ghost town. Founded in the 1880s the local population extracted something on the order of $90 million worth of silver and $50 million worth of the mineral borax from the ground. Extracted by hand in deep rock mines with hammers and chisels; by 1887 the town had 1200 residents, 22 saloons, it’s very own Chinatown, and a popular brothel—everything one could need to live a tax-paying life in the Old West. And sustainable, at least as long as the mines continued to produce. Which they did for another fifteen years. The town was abandoned by the first decade of the 1900s and was left to bleach in the desert. Thirty years, 1200 people, $140 million worth of value extracted from the ground. Is this a town or a small business that boomed and failed to adapt to new market conditions? In either case, in 1951 Walter Knott (of Knott’s Berry Farm fame) bought the whole site lock, stock, and barrel. I’m sure the county was happy to receive any money for a worthless piece of abandoned land. Of course, Knott saw not raw land but potential; he set out to renovate the site. And renovate he did, mixing new buildings with preserved relics to give it an updated, borderline amusement park feel. In the 1960s Knott donated the site to San Bernardino county (realizing the value of a significant tax benefit one would expect—a fact which in no way diminishes the generosity of the gift or the benefit to San Bernardino) and a preservation trust was established. Today visitors can see an authentic renovated boomtown that reveals California’s mining heritage. A new source of revenue from paid admissions, concessions, optional tours, restaurants, and a gift shop suggest Calico has produced value for the state of California, however inconsistently, for as long as it has existed.
Adaptation to change. Differences of values and interests. Willingness to take risks. Openness to uncertainty. Capitalizing on opportunities. That’s the nature of life in old west towns, innovation in business, social institutions, cultural evolution… just about anything that survives over time. While my actual time on this planet may limit my ability to witness the incredible pace of change firsthand, there’s no reason I need to lose a sense of history. Change is permanent. It’s all us cowboys and Indians fighting it out trying to stake a little claim, or trade my bartending skills for your ounce of silver, or come into town as the new sheriff to bring law and order. It’s not like it’s not as though some perfect template can be laid down for creating social order where chaos and conflict and ambiguity exist. This production of value is a messy business. It can mean stepping on toes (like taking land from the natives—or claim jumping); getting into fights (literally—gunfights); making some unfortunate moral choices (I’ve got nothing against the brothels, but the preachers…that’s a different story).
Why did the town of Calico fold in 1907? It quit producing value relative to alternatives in the market. They could go ahead and sell sand to anyone who would buy it, but that’s not what people wanted. Calico ran out of sliver and borax. Why stay in Calico when there’s nothing valuable left to produce. For the sentiment? Maybe; passion can fuel drive and energy and economic investment and Knott turned sentiment into an attraction.
Why did the mom and pop’s fold in Baxter Springs fold when Wal-Mart came to town? They quit producing value relative to alternatives in the market. They could go ahead and sell basic staples to anyone who would buy them, but that’s not what people wanted. Baxter Springs ran out of luck—they lost their near-monopoly. Why stay open in Baxter Springs where there’s no one who considers your overpriced soap valuable? For the sentiment? Maybe; passion can lead to community building and social innovation. But no one has yet turned their passion into a business model to counter the Wal-Mart effect.
Of course the government could step in and inject money into a community that can’t produce its own value. That seems viable, but it’s tricky to rationalize what obsolete communities should be propped up with a cash infusion. By this reasoning the government should wind its watch backward 65 million years and do something about the whole dinosaur extinction problem (a Democratic hot-button issue). And while they’re doling out cash for obsolesced sentimental pork, how about a few grand to keep Cherry running?
I do not mean to attack small towns but rather the misattribution of permanence where transience exists. Communities, their values, and their ability to produce value are all deeply and fundamentally intertwined—always moving, always changing, whether I’m looking or not. Social and spiritual and economic life don’t come with bright-line divisions; whence the mess and confusion about the separation of church and state, good and bad, right and wrong. Community longevity is a good thing; economic viability is a good thing; sometimes these good things are at odds (not always, but sometimes) so what do we do about it? Let ‘em race? Compromise to get the worst of all worlds? We can create boundaries and do our damnedest to enforce them, which speaks more about our collective urge to classify and categorize than it does about the boundaries themselves.
Calico gave me plenty of food for thought, and with my epistemic hunger fed I look for a café to get my belly fed too. Not twenty minutes down the road from the ghost town beckons a huge sign in the distance reading “CAFÉ” so I follow the road at the next exit. As I approach I’m initially surprised to see the parking lot empty (could they be closed this early?) and disappointed it dawns on me that this café is more abandoned than the ghost town I just left. I figure that since I’m here I might as well take a photo op and investigate the ghost café. I notice that the sign in front is truly gigantic…like coming upon a billboard that upon first glance advertizes milk or razorblades or whatever but on closer inspection takes up the side of a building, the scale of this sign is just a little unsettling. “What a big sign you have, granny!” “All the better to attract your attention, my dear.” Parking the car directly under the sign to step out for a picture, I’m seriously spooked when an old man in an electric wheelchair rolls out from the side of the building and approaches. It takes a moment for me to get my nerves back.
“Am I bothering you?” I shout, hoping to stop him in his tracks. I’m thinking friend or foe? He keeps toward me. “I’m just here to take some pictures, would that bother you?” I repeat. He looks ornery and I’ve got an image of armed miners defending their claim circling my head. “No, that don’t bother me,” the reply finally comes as he gets right under me. “I just come here to feed the cats.”
“You keep cats in this place?” I asked a little puzzled.
“Well I don’t keep ‘em but this place is where they live, yuh.”
I calmly step away from the guy and proceed to take pictures, feeling less threatened {Goal: Keep breathing. Relevance: Pretty high to me. Agent: Crazy old desert drifter. Outcome: More likely than a few seconds ago.} and comment, “It’s good of you to take care of them. Do you live in there?”
“What are you, nuts?” he calls the kettle black. “I live at the next exit. Come here every day to feed them.”
“On that?” I ask almost confrontationally.
“What do you mean, ‘On that.’ This thing gets me around just fine.”
“I don’t mean anything by it, only that I worked for a company that developed batteries for things like your scooter. Problem was range—how far you can go on one charge. You have to plug in forever to go like ten miles, even that’s no guarantee,” I explain , thinking the next exit is Calico.
“It’s only three miles each way. Just fine if you bring drinking water,” he explains.
Relieved by my new appraisal of the situation I become curious about the old man as I snap up some pictures of Cherry and some of him. “You been in the Mojave all your life?” I ask.
“No, I moved here for the air. Used to live in the Ozarks, they got lakes with plenty of good fishing,” he says.
“Minnesota too,” I note.
“I know, fished in Minnesota before I moved here. Ain’t no fishing out this way but sand sharks in the Mojave River,” he deadpans.
“There are sharks in the Mojave River? I thought I was dry,” I ask, taking his bait.
“It is,” he snickers. Aah, sand sharks. “Your car’s a ‘66—V6 or V8?”
“V8.”
“Had a ‘65 when I was with my first wife. Blue. Whatever happened to that…oh yuh, they sold it when she died,” he said.
“Your mother or your first wife?”
“My mother. My first wife and I were together twenty years. My old lady and me, we’ve been together twenty five now,” he discloses proudly.
“That’s a long time, congratulations,” I say. We talk a while. He tells me the owner of the café got a fat paycheck from a Hollywood crew who used it for a set so she split for Barstow. I don’t blame her. I ask about passing the time in the desert and get the distinct impression that for every gallon of drinking water he puts away a bottle of Everclear. I shudder at the thought. Still hungry and with not much left to say I move back toward the car.
“Take care Bob,” I tell him, “and I think it’s great you looking after these cats. Hope you and your wife have many good years ahead of you.”
“We’ll see. When it comes time we’re going to be cremated.”
“You want to be spread across the mountains?” I ask pointing to the backdrop across the freeway.
“No, so they can put both our ashes in a box and shake it up. Then we’ll be together forever,” he says, and I think it’s one of the sweetest sentiments I’ve ever heard.
Leaving the café behind I wonder how much the lady who abandoned it would sell it for. For that matter what it would cost to buy a huge plot of land or an entire town out here. I heard that Amboy, a little tourist town that went ghost after the interstate bypassed it, was sold kit and caboodle to a developer for half a million dollars. He said he would restore it and reopen Roy’s, a landmark motel and gas station, and maybe create a museum or some kind of tribute to its past. All very familiar.
By 5:00PM I’ve found a little something to tide me over and fueled up so I set the flexible, tentative goal (I don’t want to get too upset if I miss it) of making across California by nightfall. Desert driving is getting rough on Cherry as she overheats and I’m forced to pull over and pour water on the radiator or slow down to give her engine a break. Cars are not much more than fancy combustion chambers and circulating fluid systems. Eat gas, excrete exhaust, release heat, regulate with oil and coolant and transmission fluid. Like animals they suffer from exhaustion, overheating, and death (it’s strange to think of cars as dying because you can always swap parts from a boneyard and restore a dead car—try that with your pet Chihuahua, Dr. Frankenstein). Though clearly far more sophisticated, any anatomist will tell you that a person or an animal is a mechanical system. You maintain and nurture a body and a car just the same. Bypass surgery? Engine rebuild. Hip replacement? Rear axle upgrade. Invisalign braces? New bling grill. We have the ability to express our interiors through our cars and houses and fashion accessory pooches like we do through our words and actions and values. That’s pretty fascinating.
I didn’t know how the engine actually moved the car when I decided to rip apart Sally. Then I learned the hard (and expensive) way as I went. Maybe you’ve toyed with potato guns in high-school science or boy scouts before child protection laws went into effect. A spud gun is basically a long tube about three or four inches around, open on one end and closed on the other with an electric spark switch running from the outside to the inside. The intrepid arms specialist adds a drop of gasoline to the chamber, forces a potato in the open end, aims (one hopes), and fires the spark. If you’ve never done this you might think the potato will go maybe as far as you can throw. Try a football field. There’s an enormous amount of power in a small amount of gasoline. In Cherry’s case she has eight of these cylinders continually compressing and firing gas: the compressed gas in each cylinder is fired by a spark plug and that forces the pistons in the cylinder away from the center just like a potato. Capture the force by twisting a crankshaft and you have the rotation necessary to spin your wheels and get out of town. Not surprisingly all that combustion gets very, very hot. And very messy. Cars suffer from the automotive equivalent of clogged arteries and bronchial disease when not enough clean air is available to create that explosion in each chamber, or when the chamber gets filthy from having fired a few million times. (Fifty-thousand mile checkup, anyone?)
Another fun car fact: despite being counterintuitive, turning on the heater when the car overheats helps. It’s because the heater works by carrying warm cooling fluid away from the engine and forcing it into the cabin. This turns the heater into a small second radiator. It’s like standing in front of a fan on a hot day. Most people instinctively lift their arms away from their body, because having your arms by your side traps heat in your core and keeps you warm, whereas lifting them increases the surface area available for cooling. So it works, despite the discomfort the driver then suffers for the additional heat on top of the outside temperature.
Even if Cherry isn’t really alive she needs care and maintenance like one’s own body or the family pet. And right now she needs to cool down. And I myself am sweating buckets as I drive, noticing just how mechanical my own body is…if I don’t drink a few gallons of water in this desert heat I’ll dehydrate, take sick, pass out and a hot engine will be the least of my concerns. I adopt a very measured pace in the left lane, letting more anxious drivers pass while I take in the sights and the feel of the vast hot desert. But right now it’s not so much the sights that interest me but the feel inside the car. Having been on the road over a week and having done enough invasive surgery to remember the mechanical details of the old girl so I’m more in tune with the feel of the car. The seats don’t slide back far enough for a tall guy like me. The door and kick panel by my left foot are awkward and cramped, and I have to constantly adjust the window crank so it doesn’t stick me in the knee. The temperature gauge is obscured by the steering wheel. The rear view mirror doesn’t come equipped with a filter to reduce the glare of blinding headlights at night. There are no headrests, no electric windows, no remote rear defroster. The lap belts lack shoulder straps. And the interior lights illuminate the floor but not the cabin itself making map reading impossible. As a piece of ergonomic design, this car sucks.
I still love her. Mostly.
Over the past week I’ve become reacquainted with these quirks of hers. Refamiliarized myself with her body roll, long stopping distance, uncomfortable seats (the pillow and cushion help), and flakey electrical system reminds me of the evolutionary innovation of product design. Just as a simple example this car would be completely illegal to produce and sell today since it would fail to meet most minimum safety standards. But it’s not like they didn’t know that fleshy pink bodies like to exit the car through the windshield on impact in 1966. The fact is that the feature of concern, the valued measure of a car’s value given the alternatives, was horsepower. Muscle cars (and the early Mustang counts as an early muscle regardless of how you Mopar bigots disparage her) were not about comfort or safety or mileage or handling, no ma’am; they were about going as fast as hell in a straight line.
A Brief and Inaccurate History of Automotive Dimensions of Value
- 1900s – Motion. The whole point of having a car is to move your body from place to place.
- 1910s – Affordability. The Model-T was a hit not because of its antilock brakes.
- 1920s – Capacity. Wouldn’t it be nice to bring a few suitcases and your wife or girlfriend (God forbid you bring both) on a trip out past the dustbowl?
- 1930s – Size. Have you ever seen one of those Al Capone gangster mobiles? Gianormous.
- 1940s – Performance. Better tune the engine to move all that metal.
- 1950s – Styling. Harley Earl made everyone want to park a rocketship in their front yard. Welcome to the postwar boom!
- 1960s – Power. Small bodies with oversized engines made driving the thrill of a lifetime.
- 1970s – Safety. Ford makes cars that blow up on impact. Head rests and shoulder belts help kill fewer people on the Eisenhower Interstate.
- 1980s – Efficiency. Oil crisis, small is in; “Drive 55” campaigns help burn fewer gallons per mile.
- 1990s – Status. Am we more a Beamer or a Jag, darling? Hell, let’s get both.
- 2000s – Efficiency (but this time we mean it). Oh yeah, that whole oil thing. How about my Prius and your H2 fight and let’s see who wins?
Different dimensions of value, all present and important to different buyers at different times, artificially collapsed with an arbitrary “most important” dimension representing a decade when in fact all of these dimensions all matter for any car. They always have to some degree, even from the first production prototype, and as the environment changed (the car buying public demanded or were induced to demand through advertising; laws were passed in response to reckless corporate profiteering and high-speed fatalities) different aspects of car design adapted. More accurately designers adapted the design…unlike natural selection this evolutionary process is more intentional and directed. They suited design to the purpose the market demanded. Speed, affordability, safety, whatever. You, dear collective consumer, you determine the purpose for which we humble car giants design. Sometimes we pay attention to your demand for affordability. Other times we keep obsolete plants running in Flint, MI well past their prime.
This interests me because as I think it through I see a pattern. Cars through the decades have emphasized different features. Observers might draw the conclusion that there were “most important” or “best” or “essential” elements of design that changed as the car evolved. Yet it’s not clear that cars today maximize any dimension of value, nor that they should; rather it seems that the interplay between buying public (not individual buyers but the market as a whole) and design (not individual design but trends, legal requirements, and standards) has shaped the evolution of the car where decisions were made, not dimensions maximized. Here, you want a car that gets a hundred miles to the gallon? Make it out of fiberglass and ditch the interior trim. Cut the weight. The French figured this out after World War II and produced the Citroen 2CV designed so two peasants could take a 100kg of produce to market over unpaved farm roads. Fifty miles per gallon. Zero to sixty in an hour. Owners report that they’d have to make an appointment to merge. Collide with any vehicle on an American highway and you, your passenger, and your produce are instantly killed. As efficiency goes up the safety and power and status (in this case it’s specifically a peasant mobile) decline. Not because they must in some ultimate laws-of-physics sense, but at this point mechanical engineering doesn’t show us the way. A nuclear engine or di-lithium crystals and maybe we’ve got ourselves a game.
The idea of dimensions of values bothers me and if it were restricted to cars I’d move on. I think about Amboy and Goffs and these other Route 66 towns that I’d like to see preserved. But I’m me, and I’m not ashamed to demand modern conveniences, a reasonable price for gas, and an assortment of cheap souvenirs the general store. I value historical information and affordability. Someone else may be interested in recapturing an authentic little bit of the old Route 66 experience without the invasion of modern accoutrements and will pay any price. They value authenticity above all. Three question for an Amboy or a Goffs: (1) Can you satisfy my needs along with this other persons, and the needs of anyone else who may come through? (2) Should you satisfy my needs and forego his, or vice versa? (3) How will you decide?
That’s the puzzle. When different values are not directly interrelated it’s nice to believe everyone can get everything they want. The tradeoff comes from a budget constraint: you can’t afford to give everyone everything they want because the aspects of an event or experience people value don’t ever seem to end. I’m interested in history, she’s interested in authenticity. No conflict of interests (just non-overlapping differences of interest) but serious contention to allocate the limited $20,000 budget set aside by the state for “preservation of historic places of interest.” Someone has to decide, to trade off, to live with the consequences of dissatisfying some people. That’s the essence of niche marketing and focused campaigns—making the most of the scarce resources available. I wonder if the challenge is not so much getting it right in some perfect apocalyptic final sense, but getting it started. Putting that $20,000 toward a building restoration project and a scrapbook of newspaper clippings. To act, to do something if not the perfect thing, and trust the process of evolution: passers through will bitch about not having an authentic experience, and I’ll bitch about the prices. Take that not as personal attacks but listen to it as input, as feedback, as the chance to make a better Amboy for everyone. Evolution doesn’t get things right, it gets them better. It gives the advantage to organisms suited for their environment and lets them continually adapt. Change the environment and that advantage goes to hell. Exchange a virtually-naked desert native and an arctic seal and guess what will happen. It’s not that they’re good or bad animal or human designs but that they’re well-suited or poorly-suited for their environment.Cherry is poorly suited for the heat of the desert but nicely suited for a leisurely Chicago afternoon drive. A Hummer H2 is poorly suited for a fuel-conscious consumer but beautifully suited for a status-conscious consumer or a platoon commander. Amboy is poorly suited to survive as a high-traffic monopolistic oasis but may make an excellent nostalgic retreat for the discriminating tourist. Dimensions of adaptive value vary in response to the environment, be that environment physical or social or both.
As I while away the desert scenery letting impressions of the Descent of Fords I realize the sun is setting and at 7:30PM I come across yet another abandoned desert town. I get out and stretch for a while, letting the blood circulate through my legs and toe touching to limber my back. Consulting the map I see that Arizona is only an hour away along I-40 and maybe another 30 minutes if I take the National Trails historic route. After a few pictures of the ghost town I opt for the latter and head toward the California border. I’m up for the dark and solitude for a few hours. I can generally sustain
a few hours before the night driving gets to me. The road feels amazing and the night air cool in my hair. I stop more than I plan to and take in the scenery (what I can see of it) and the silence. A leisurely pace, a brief stop for gas, a long stretch without oncoming headlights and the road becomes hypnotic. I notice what at first seems to be specs of debris on my windshield and realize the stars have consumed the sky. The Big Dipper on my left shoulder points the way north just in case I lose my bearings. As I come up to Needles, CA I’m suddenly reminded that that was the first town outside Kingman…meaning Kingman loomed just an hour away. Not wanting to spend the night there again I plan to push through; I’ll stop for coffee and cheap gas and make it at least to Seligman. I also realize I’m going to miss the twisting pass to Oatman, the town I set out to see this morning. That’s okay I rationalize to myself; I saw the Calico ghost town and that got my blood moving, and if I’m going to be “stranded in the middle of nowhere” tomorrow I want to that to be a cultural commentary not a geographic description.When I arrive in Kingman around 9:30PM, though, exhaustion and uncertainty are just too great. I see a discount rate at the Motel 6 across from the Flying J I found myself marooned a few days before. Superstition tells me not to stay in the same motel tonight and reason tells me not to fuck around with the distributor cap tonight. Happily the Flying J has a few of those two-for-one protein bars that brought me in last time and I stock up before checking into the motel. I ask for a 6:30 wakeup call because I don’t want to be here tonight and the sooner I can make Flagstaff the happier I’ll feel.
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