We lit out for the countryside this afternoon, figuring that watching the sun set over the Valley from some vantage point up on the mountain was a good way to mark Valentine’s Day. Smart of us. There’s a road that climbs up San Jacinto from Palm Desert called the Palms to Pines Highway. It offers a number of such vantage points and we chose one.
Driving up Palms to Pines from Palm Desert I got the oddest feeling, raising itself on the back of my neck along with a few hairs, and then I realized what it was. I’d been there before. In 1966, loaded into the back of the turquoise Chevy Malibu wagon with the younger three siblings, our parents occasionally declaiming at us from the front seat, we drove the Palms to Pines and got out at a vantage point, marveled at the contorted road downhill. Like a barrel of worms with St. Vitus’ Dance, as Breece D’J Pancake said of the roads of his own West Virginia, but this was just one road and my mother shot a few slides of it, with which we subsequently regaled our flatland relatives: “The is Mount Rushmore, and this is Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and this is a road we drove on in the California desert, and this is the Grand Canyon.” Amended over the decades with layers of iterative inaccuracies, my memory of the road I saw at age six was part of the California I carried in my head until I could move here, along with the fallen Sequoiadendrons in Yosemite and the fence lizards in the campground in Anaheim. Today it felt like home, and the agaves and yuccas at roadside didn’t hurt.
It struck me a couple days ago that it was ten years ago this week that I decided to move to the desert. My ex- and the dog and I were visiting Joshua Tree, and she noticed the shift in my mood even through the flu she brought with her, a light suffusing me when I entered the desert, and for a few years afterward I remembered her as suggesting we move here but what she actually said was “We have to find a way for you to live in the desert full-time.” And we did, apparently, though not in the way I’d imagined at the time.
But today I preferred to think of that even earlier visit, the six-year-old crammed into a station wagon in the Colorado Desert in July, one sibling still in diapers and one only a couple months out of them and a third old enough to be really annoying, in the days before auto air conditioning was attainable to the non-wealthy, my parents about half the age I am now, not realizing the Lorenzian imprinting to which they were subjecting their eldest duckling.
Well, I’m back. And I’m not alone. And it’s Valentine’s Day, and we watched our new home in the Valley below us turn deepening shades of rose and indigo, and then headed farther uphill onto the mountain and into the dark. I’ve been calling her The Raven here, out of desires for poetry and privacy both, and I probably will still do that here and there, but this month she left the city she loved to live with me in the desert, so she goddamn gets her real name used here. Her name is Annette. I love her.
This is, flat out, a nice piece of writing. From the heart, it let’s us see events through your eyes. And to think I was just getting used to “the Raven”.
Yes, beautiful writing is what you find here. So vivid that if my life passes before me at death that there will be Chris memories in there, too, because they resonate with me and become my memories, too…
Wait’ll they hear about Space Kitty….
(Love you too, Chris. XO)
~Annette