Letter from the desert: Jarhead
Posted by Chris Clarke on October 15, 2008
At the wheel on Saturday afternoon, The Raven flinched. “What the…?” A low black sports car came out of nowhere behind us on Kelbaker Road, passed us doing at least 40 miles per hour more than our sedate 60 or so, and straddled the center line as it sped toward the dunes.
“What’s wrong with him?” The Raven takes it personally when people casually endanger her life. She’s funny that way.
“He seems to be having trouble choosing a lane,” I observed.
The Kelso Depot was closed when we arrived, but we decided to walk around a little bit in the oddly chill air. We pulled into the lot and parked next to a low black sports car. A young man with a military-issue haircut emerged from the restroom, walked past us diffidently and got in his car. “Aha,” I said. He fishtailed out of the gravel lot and sped up the road to Cima.
The Raven and I walked around the old Depot, now tricked out as a visitor center and museum. We looked in windows, our breath clouding the glass. A sign warned against feeding the local kit foxes.
“This is the shortest route between the 29 Palms Marine Corps base and Las Vegas,” I told The Raven. “The jarheads speed through here like maniacs when they get a couple days of leave. Sometimes they roll their cars and die.”
Half an hour later, heading down Morning Star Mine road after I picked up my mail at Cima, we saw lights in the sky, circling. A few miles farther on a low black sports car had left the road, plowed a furrow in the desert. It had come to rest on its driver’s-side door. The young man paced at the shoulder.
The Raven waited in her car as I walked up to him. He was shaken and said his head hurt, a little. He declined my offer of water but thanked me, and said that help was on its way. He stood there patiently for a moment as I looked deep into his eyes.
