The shadow of Mount San Jacinto falls on Joshua Tree National Park. Photo taken from the north end of the South Lykken Trail.
It’s been an interesting week or so, perspective-wise. First came the obligatory and even trite introspection that comes along with moving to a new city, which I’m almost getting used to. Last night I mentioned to one of my new neighbors that I’d moved more than forty times in my life. A number of those moves were from one place to another in the city limits of Buffalo, and then another dozen within the Bay Area, and although after a few years in Zeke’s old neighborhood in Pinole it finally dawned on me that I no longer lived in Berkeley, the transition itself was rather subtle. So let’s not count those. Still, there are a lot of big moves on my Permanent Record. From rural New York to Buffalo, then to the Bay Area, DC, the Bay Area again, Nipton, Los Angeles and then here. That doesn’t quite bring me to Army Brat or Adjunct Professor levels of mobility, but it’s a fair bit.
Add to that the paring down of possessions. While moving to Palm Springs has been prompted by cheaper cost of living as much as anything else, the new place is smaller than the one in West Hollywood. Significantly. I’d thought I’d attained a certain Zen-like simplicity in the number of my possessions when I gave away everything I owned three years ago. Turns out there was more nonattaching to do. We’ve been giving things away, both by way of actually giving them away and by way of letting the Beautiful Stepdaughter sell them and keep the money. There is more to give away. All my books are in boxes again. I plan to digitize all my music and sell the hard copies, and then there’s the issue of the kayak, still unsold, and my beautiful broken espresso machine that needs only an eighty dollar repair to be a perfectly functional espresso machine that’s too big for the new kitchen, and my little wok which we moved and it doesn’t fit. Who knew abundance could be as big a curse as scarcity? Stupid monkey’s paw.
And so the last couple of weeks have been spent not only moving to a place neither of us have lived in before but divesting ourselves of many of the trappings of our previous respective lives, which is pretty much a recipe for introspection if you swing that way, and then the day before yesterday I’m sitting in the new place and get a text from The Raven. She’s at the old place with Beautiful Stepdaughter arranging the disposition of various items, and our downstairs neighbor there William suddenly turns out to be dead of undetermined causes. The LAPD keep him on our front step, engurneyed and ensheeted, for about three hours while they do whatever it is they do. He was a bit older than me, I think, and disabled to the point of needing occasional help getting his groceries from the paratransit van to the porch, which I provided if I was around. A couple years back when Beautiful Stepdaughter was living with us he bit her head off about noise from her sewing machine. He then wrote her a four page letter of apology. He and I got to know each other very slightly when I went downstairs to warn him that I would be putting together a bookshelf and making noise. Now he’s dead, and some other neighbors have the bookshelf.
So that was even more perspective right there.
I’ve had two rather large realizations come out of all the perspective. One is that my life, so far, when viewed from the perspective of tourism on Planet Earth, has been rather rewarding. Even without leaving my home continent, aside from that one weekend, I’ve seen remarkable things and lived in remarkable places, within short commutes of iconic scenescapes, most recently Hollywood Sign-bedecked, Star-Sidewalk Studded Central LA but also including the Bay Area (oh, the Golden Gate Bridge), DC with all its white marble, and that decaying city I once lived in that had the good fortune of being twenty miles south of Niagara Falls. Pretty lucky. Some people never get out of the suburbs. Or the urbs.
The other epiphany was that over the last months my love for the desert has grown a sour edge. A combination of the non-stop stream of bad news and the incessant internecine politics, probably. Plain old burnout is a likely issue as well; working lots of hours and meeting lots of frustrations is standard operating procedure for activist work, but it’s been decades since I’ve had to worry about making rent every single month as a result of that work. The last time my annual gross income was as low as it was for 2010 was in 1986. I was 26 years old and working for a buck fifty above minimum wage. I sometimes wonder whether readers here get the impression, what with my moving from Hollywood to Palm Springs, that I am comfortably well off. And I am! In all aspects of my life other than the financial. I had about a decade in which I never had to worry about how much the groceries in my cart would cost. I wasn’t particularly happy during that decade. I’m happier now, even if my income last year did put me right at the median for annual income for the nation of Botswana. (The preceding sentence is not hyperbole.) So the combination of immense threat and unrewarded effort and the sense that the longer I work to try to save these places I love the more likely it will be that I end up cadging quarters in front of the Walmart has been, increasingly, a source of unpleasant resenty thoughts.And I don’t want those thoughts to color how I feel about the desert which, after all, I just moved back to.
And that feeling is getting in the way of my own writing. And that makes me upset.
So I’ve been walking out.
On Saturday it was out and up the street to the North Lykken trail, a sweet and mildly strenuous set of switchbacks up the bottom thousand feet of the east side of San Jacinto, leading from one trailhead about a half mile from my house to the Tram Road, with a bailout possibility about halfway along. I bailed out, ambled down the steep few hundred feet to the Palm Springs Museum’s parking lot, then made my way to the espresso place and home. The hike showed me that I have been kidding myself thinking of the likes of Runyon Canyon as any kind of “keeping in shape” “trail”: I’d forgotten that it’s not just the altitude gain in the distance traveled that makes a hard hike. Runyon is steep, but you could pretty much skateboard the whole way up. When you start having to lift your boots a couple of feet with each step, that’s a different kind of workout. The hike wasn’t exertion enough to faze a mildly fit local hiker, though, and despite my relative torpor over the last year I was mainly just footsore at the end. It was worth it. Tons of sideblotched lizards and whiptails, ravens and mockers and a shrike, barrel cacti and chuparosa and a half dozen shrubs I need to look up.
I let a few days elapse because my feet really were sore. Told myself that I’d head over to the running shoes store around the corner, get some crosstrainers that actually fit, and take it easy on the blisters for once, and then I did a little math and looked at what I’m likely to be able to invoice for January and realized that the blisters didn’t hurt all that much. As the sun went behind the mountain today I headed for the South Lykken. The South and North Lykken are separated by the mouth of Tahquitz Canyon. The South’s trailhead is only a little farther from our place than its Northern twin’s. Like the North, it starts in switchbacks – these up a huge flake of tilted rock that remind me of nothing so much as the Flatirons in Boulder. I didn’t go far: I’d run out of the house in a hurry to get some sweating done – mission accomplished – and reserved the full length of the trail for a day when I’d actually eaten something. But I got some elevation, and saw some (what I think is probably) Santa Rosa sage, and fell just a little bit further in love with this new place I’ve moved to.
This is why I do all that other stuff.
Chris, You should do the Canyon Trail at Big Morongo Canyon Nature Preserve,all the way to Indian Avenue, maybe have someone meet you at the bottom. I was there last Sunday, really a wonderful hike, with a friend who had never hiked in the desert.
I can’t do the round trip back up, one way is enough for me- going downhill, and sorry, but the beautiful cottonwoods are leafless now, even Senor Cottonwood ;-)
Morongobill
I like people who recognize and appreciate true wealth. It appears you are adjusting to and will feel very comfortable in your new surroundings. I enjoyed this post.
Liked this post. I’m happy to have you guys living nearby!
Yeah, Florian; we need to hook up for caffeine or something. Did you ride in the Tour de PS today?
I went for a ride today but not with the tour.