tl;dr version: we had a great time and we’re doing it again, so be prepared to visit the desert on the weekend of April 21, 2012. We should have warm days and cool nights around then, and very dark skies.
Friday was a bit of a mess. I’d planned on spending the morning making some last minute preparations for the campout, and ended up instead spending it getting a new battery for Annette’s car, which took up basically the entire morning. She was sick, and it was bad enough I was ditching my sick girlfriend for a weekend, I certainly wasn’t going to leave her without a car. But I found a mechanic that works on Minis two blocks from our house who was able to swap the battery out, and change the oil and airfilter besides, in a couple hours. I got out to the site only half an hour later than I said I would, and even late I was still the first person there. So, win.
One other note about the morning: a few minutes of it was spent greeting my neighbor Florian Boyd, who dropped off a shade awning, a rollup camping kitchen table and about five gallons of water in a handy jug. He couldn’t make it to the meetup, but between giving us shade and that extra water he made it far more comfortable — though not as fun as if he’d been able to make it. Thanks, Florian.
But when I got to the site, there was an appealing ironwood tree not far from where I parked, and it was casting a nice patch of shade, so I postponed setting up the awning and dragged a chair out into that shade. After about half an hour of decompressing, letting the road noise ebb from my ears and the auto repair stress seep out of my shoulders, Jim Stanger pulled into camp. We had just enough time to chat a little and then a sedan crunched over the low berm and into the campsite. Out came James Goebel, his partner Pamela Chui, and their friends Philip Anselmo and Sonia Mineo, all from the environs of Irvine California. We six sat and chatted beneath the ironwood until the sun started angling toward the west, around 5:30, at which point we all went for a walk in the cooler air. High points of that walk: coyote burrows, cryptobiotic soil crusts, ocotillos still covered in green from the storms of September, desert pavement and washes and lotsa little holes in the soil.
We turned back and got to camp just as John Helms and Hope Tracey arrived bearing nodules they’d rockhounded a few miles south, like geodes only without a hollow center. I started a fire, Pamela started cooking up some lentil soup on a cartridge stove, and Philip went for a walk in camp and made a new friend:
That photo’s by Jim Stanger. The other highlight of the twilight was John and Hope finding a sidewinder down the road a bit.
The rest of the evening, and on into the neighborhood of 3 am, was spent sitting around the fire eating, talking desert politics, drinking wine, and enjoying each others’ company. Midway through this part of the festivities Ruth Nolan showed up, bearing good cheer, more wine, and a few delicious snacks. There were some meteors. One by one people drifted away to sleep, the coyotes sang off toward Desert Center, and then it was…
Day Two.
We woke slowly at 7-8, puttering and making coffee and various shared breakfasts. I’m going to have to do the polenta again: that worked well.
Seen in the photo above, someone lounging in the shade of Florian’s awning while Jim S., at far left, makes yet more breakfast.
After a while, Hope and John took off to go see an art show in Joshua Tree. Ruth volunteered to lead everyone on a trip up to a canyon she knew, where she thought there might be petroglyphs. Someone who went on that trip will have to provide some details: I stayed in camp to greet Saturday arrivals. Of whom there was one: Janeen Armstrong, longtime reader of this blog and the one that was here before it, and a good friend. Janeen traveled to the meetup from Port Townsend, WA, and thus deserves some sort of prize even ignoring the fact that she brought Northwestern coffee and blended Scotch with her. We had about twenty minutes of catching up and then the canyon trip returned, with people not having found petroglyphs but reporting that they all had great fun nonetheless. Then the Irvine folks took off, and a couple hours later so did Ruth. Jim, Janeen and I took a slow saunter through a gorgeous wash filled with ironwoods and palo verdes, came out on Eagle Mountain Road, then walked back up to camp accompanied by about two dozen Gambels quail.
Another fire, another dinner mainly cooked by Jim, some of the delicious whisky thoughtfully provided by Neen, several hours of great conversation, and our vows to get to sleep earlier than we had on Friday night were technically kept, but not by much.
In the morning the three of us drank aero pot coffee Janeen kindly made from a batch of Guatemalan beans, which she hand-ground on site. It was good. Breakfast quesdaillas, more coffee of the less labor-intensive sort, and we were all three of us just about to reluctantly mention the prospect of rolling up the tents when a note came in from the outside world that made us procrastinate. About an hour later the sender of that note, Lakey Kolb, showed up with her Beau Stephen Andrews and their pups Louie and Stella. More great conversation ensued for an hour or so. Then we all headed for home.
Along the way, there was a lot of great conversation and brainstorming and enthusiasm about new approaches to the save the desert thing. Among the things we all generally agreed on were that 1) this was a great way for people that didn’t know the desert at all (such as for example Janeen and a few of the Irvine Gang) to get to know and love the place, and 2) we needed to do it again.
So I’m looking for venues, thinking of balances between creature comforts for the not-particularly-hardcore and actual deserty desert so that we’re not camping in an irrigated park, and April 21 seems like a good target date. So mark your calendars and I’ll have more news soon. With seven months to plan, some folks from farther away who said they’d wished they could make this one might actually be able to make the next one.
And help me think of something to call this new series of get-togethers other than “meetup.” The first one to suggest the winning name gets to eat polenta at the Spring 2012 Coyote Crossing Whatchamacallit. Suggestions from the thesaurus: “affair, assemblage, assembly, assignation, audience, bunch, call, cattle call, company, competition, conclave, concourse, concursion, confab, conflict, confrontation, congregation, congress, contest, convention, convocation, date, encounter, engagement, gang, get-together, huddle, introduction, meet, one on one, parley, powwow, rally, rendezvous, reunion, session, showdown, talk, tryst, turnout.”
I kind of like Coyote Crossing Congress. And Coyote Crossing Rendezvous would allow us to reclaim that acronym from the obsolete rock band that’s still using it.
I like rendezvous, too. Isn’t that what they called it when the mountain men met up?
Wish I were in the US so that I could’ve come. Janeen’s coffee sounds like a must-not-miss too! Glad to read you guys had such a great time!
Also, my suggestion for the meet name would be “Drunken Desert Debauchery”. Get drunk on the starry skies by night and feast on the smut-tastically gorgeous landscape by day! :-)
‘Desert Bloom’ catches the contrast of humans gathering for friendship in a human unfriendly (or at least aggressively indifferent) setting. Plays better as words off the page—2012 Coyote Crossing Desert Bloom—than as speech: “I’m going blooming” or “I’m going to a bloom this weekend”.
The French philosophy nerd that I am, I like ‘Coyote Crossing Assemblage’ - only because an assemblage is the gathering together of various elements (human and nonhuman, i.e. the desert, ocotillo, Gambells quail (which I’m upset I missed), cowboy coffee, etc.) in a concrete space through the connection of various forces and desires - haha!
That said, “CCA” doesn’t have a nice ring to it whereas BDB’s recommendation of ‘CC Desert Bloom’ is intriguing - though without the whole human unfriendly element (considering the desert was very friendly to us this weekend and has been to human populations for quite some time—assuming we at least appreciate the nomadic characteristics of these groups).
Rachel, when mountain men meet up around here, it’s generally called “jail.”
Big, venemous critters in the night! Now I’m doubly sorry to have missed it.
Chris, your Jeep looks suspiciously like it’s clean. That’s a little disturbing.
... yes, I actually do know how to spell “venomous.” The thought of giant scorpions and sidewinders around a campfire just did odd things to my fingers’ co-ordination.
So happy to have been there :-). It was lovely meeting everyone and I wish we could have stayed for the entire trip!
As for name suggestions for the next meet up here’s my contribution:
‘Washing’ Through the Desert
I like the idea of incorporating ‘wash’ because of the idea that when storms hit and create them they not only shift things away, but also bring new things into the desert from the nearby hills/mountains/large rocks. So we’re kind of ‘washing’ through ourselves discovering old trails, carving new ones, and in so many ways the desert is doing the same to us.
Yeah, it rained here a couple months ago.
Convene the Loya Jirga!
Loya Jirga! It’s both euphonious and will get us investigated by the NSA!
“Group Howl” comes to mind as well.
Anyway, I am specifically going to make sure and guilt trip ^H^H^H^H invite a few people from farther east this time, your Rachel Shaws and ChasCPetersons, frinstance, and I think April gives us plenty of time to ramp up the peer pressure, don’t you? Not to mention the Bay Area folks, who need to be represented at CoyoteCon 2012.1.
CoyoteCon FTW!!!
Meetup alternative names:
Coyote Crossing Critters
Coyote Crossing Creatures
And there was much rejoicing that the evilnastyscary BIG alecrán was seen on the first night and then stayed hidden away once the wimp from the great wet north arrived. I had the best time, y’all. A huge thanks to you, Chris, and to everyone who made me feel welcome and comfortable even though I was far from my comfort zone.
Am a fan of confab personally…but group howls are good for the soul ;) Sad to have missed this, but barring any major disasters, the Cdn contingent ought to be able to run away in April 2012.
If we call it a Howl there will have to be actual howling. Recorded. On YouTube. +1!
I believe that could be arranged.