Havasu getaway

My wife and I fell into three free nights at a time-share in Havasu City, a sprawling collection of townhouses and malls on a gentle bajada leading down to the Arizona  (eastern) shore of Lake Havasu, which straddles the southern California/Arizona border.

It was good just to experience again the California deserts.  I used to argue with my dad about whether there would be room on the planet for all the world's people.  I thought there would not, but my dad pointed to the big empty deserts of the west and said there would be plenty of room for new cities.  He was proven partially right, as two major cities, Palmdale and Lancaster, popped up in later years in the desert north of L.A. (they look like Havasu City except flat and without a lake).

On Pearblossom Highway, heading east into the still vast and empty desert, my dad seemed further vindicated.  You could build dozens of Palmdales and Lancasters in these deserts, but today I would ask my dad, "Do you want to cover the planet with townhouses, franchise restaurants and malls?"  Just to spar with me, he might have answered, "Yes."

My dad and I would have argued about Havasu City.  I would have moaned from the back seat that it was ugly.  On this trip Susan and I arrived at sunset- a beautiful red splash across the desert horizon- and in the foreground RV lots, warehouses, high tension wires, stray Taco Bells and Burger Kings, and finally malls, Denny's, Starbucks, Chili's and thousands of townhouses.

I'm older now than my dad was when we had those arguments, and I've accepted certain things, for instance, the importance of comfort.  It didn't take long for me to love our Havasu time-share, with its king bed and big plump pillows.  The two mile walk to the nearest mall was aided by wonderful air, warm and cool at the same time, somehow buoyant, as if you were swimming in it. Beautiful desert canyons are everywhere around the city, with isolated trails that go for miles.  The old downtown, where we watched the Veteran's Day parade, has a lot of charm and character, as did the parade.  Not a bad retirement spot, really.  I must channel the 14 year old me and tell him to dull some of his sharp edges.

The history of Havasu is poignant.  It was the last refuge of the Chemehuevi tribe. Their name might mean, "people who play with fish," or it might mean, "nose in the air like a roadrunner." As the meaning of their name is forgotten, so they are largely forgotten, except in Havasu City by the lake, in the waiting room for the ferry that takes you to the California side and the Indian casino.  On our visit most of the passengers waited outside, but I wanted the air conditioning in the waiting room. Inside, several teenagers were enjoying an adult free atmosphere.  I noticed a series of posters around the room that told the story of a Native American tribe.  A boy and girl were horsing around by the first poster, so I had to nudge towards them until they moved aside.  I read that the Chemehuevi were nomadic hunters and gatherers.  Their ancestral territory covered thousand of square miles from the San Gabriel Mountains, through Nevada and Arizona. They liked to take long trips in small groups, but sometimes men traveled long distances alone.  They were an inquisitive people who "liked to visit all tribes, whether friends or enemies; to speak strange tongues, sing strange songs, and marry strange wives."

They were not particular to the Havasu area, but were hemmed in by European settlement and, at times, hostile Mojave Indians.  Early in the 20th Century a Chemehuevi reservation was created at the low point in the Havasu Valley, no doubt chosen because of frequent flooding.  At this time there were only a few hundred Chemehuevi left.  In the 1930's, Parker Dam, built to supply water to L.A. from the Colorado River, created Lake Havasu, at the bottom of which are the remains of the Chemehuevi reservation.  To make amends, the tribe was offered land on the western shore, which, as it happened, was traditional enemy territory for them.  At this point most members left, or married out of the tribe. Some of the bloodline were able to establish the casino, and these remnants of the tribe, although they no longer command the deserts and mountains (or possibly the strange wives) receive boatloads of money.

Is this a happy ending?  It depends on how you look at it.  Certainly the story entails the death of a culture, which is an all-American story.  When my grandfather left Ukraine around 1900, he left a culture that had existed for over a thousand years.  That culture is now gone, though people who were formed by it live on.  Just about every American can say something like that.  We are all Chemehuevi, with our village at the bottom of a man-made lake.

Havasu City is not a great city.  There are no central areas for people to interact- unless you count Starbucks- and little in the way of arresting architecture.  But Havasu City does have the desert, the river, the big sky, the mountains, canyons, friendly people and the spirit of the Chemehuevi.  When you think about it, that's a lot.

$6.99 is too much to pay Time-Warner for a rental

That's what I'm sweating in my living room tonight- I've got the house to myself and I'm looking at this potentially interesting movie but when I see it costs $6.99 I get upset. On the one hand I could spend the evening pondering all the ways we're soon to go extinct: nuclear war, bioterror, climate change, the genetic engineering of our replacements, boredom, anger- but none of this tonight, at least for me, is able to compete with my rage at Time-Warner for charging $6.99 for a movie I don't even know if I'll like. What does it mean, this preference for the passing peeve over the great DOOM? Does it mean that the truth is so sickeningly awful that we can't actually think about it for very long, or....stay with me here...is it because, just maybe, it really is terrible that Time-Warner would charge, well, anything to rent a movie. I already paid the bastards, now they want more for this over-hyped stuff? Before going any further I want to mention- what the reader may well have noted- that I'm using a standard s.o.c. (stream of consciousness) style, and also that I've decided to write, for now, without paragraphs. This last might sound odd from a former English teacher who enforced on generations the solemn duty to write in paragraphs, but it's just the way I feel. I realized I don't always have to give the reader such a blatant signal that I've shifted focus. You, the current reader, can tell already when I shift focus, can't you? Not that I claim to be doing this as a great artist would. As, for instance, Cormac McCarthy did when he stopped using quotation marks, and then he stopped describing his characters' physical selves. The difference between me and McCarthy is that he never said, "Hey, look, I stopped using quotation marks," while I felt the need to announce my experiment, as if in fear of reprimand for breaking rules. That's what happens when you give up fiction and sign-on for the literal, where rules are rules. And when you retire from English teaching, you say to your former students, "Consider this: you have to know about paragraphs before you can stop using them." You have to know about anything to stop doing it, otherwise you don't know what you stopped doing, or why you stopped. This gives an insight into original sin. It's said that we don't have to have bitten the forbidden fruit ourselves to have, more or less, virtually bitten it, and to decide, again, not to bite it. But, as noted, you can't stop doing something unless you are first doing it. The resolution, I think, is that we bite the apple (as popularly conceived) when we first achieve consciousness. Then we see ourselves, what we are made of, our appetites, our actions. Then we see other people, and note similar patterns. Not only does the apple not fall far from the tree, it grows on the tree. In the Wizard of Oz when the apple trees, under the influence of a witch, pick their own apples and throw them at Dorothy et al, they are throwing knowledge at them, packets of understanding that the innocent travelers are not ready for, one of many assaults during their quest that lead Dorothy to choose the drab plains of Kansas over the sensuality and vivid life of Oz...to choose Auntie Em over the Wicked Witch. I'd like to see a movie about that...but for $6.99?

If I could write....

...I would write about an older guy who, at his wife’s behest, cleans out his closet of items that can go to Goodwill, but as he takes long un-worn garments off the rack and gazes at them, opening unaccustomed windows of memory, he is overcome with emotion.

…I would write about the same guy doing the same thing with his old clothes a week later and not giving a shit.

…I would write a story about how last week an asteroid struck the earth and destroyed it, but we don’t know because we're an afterglow.

…I would write about a man who suddenly discovers that he has aged.

…I would write about a young man who wishes he were older.

…I would write about a man who wonders what it would be like to be a woman. Would it be easier, more powerful?

…I would write about a woman who wonders what it would be like to be a man. Would it be easier, more powerful?

…I would write about tardigrades, animals the size of pinheads who live everywhere on earth, in space and at the bottom of the oceans, and all over our bodies.

…I would write about what would happen if you tried to kiss a tardigrade (it would eat your face).

…I would write about a man who inherits his son’s dog when his son goes away to college. This man only liked cats, but now he has a dog.

…I would write about the same man with the dog, who realizes that he loves the dog but would rather have a cat. “What are the ethics of this?” the man wonders.

...I would write about a high school English teacher who, for years, wondered, “Is there value to what I teach? Will this 14 year old boy who wiggles in class and dreams of freedom on the bonny green be nurtured and guided through the modern age by Great Expectations”?  “Why not?”, the man concludes, “It’s as good as anything else.”

...I would write about the same high school teacher thinking about the earlier years when he taught elementary school. “Am I as useful now as I was then,” he wonders, “I taught kids to read and do arithmetic. Now what do I teach them?” The man answers his own question: “I teach them what it’s like to be 70 years old.”

...I would write about a man who wanted to be a novelist and one day he has an idea about why it never worked out: His thoughts are most comfortable when expressed in short outbursts, rather than ongoing narrative. “I don’t have enough to say to fill a book, “ the man thinks.

…I would write about this same man who was told by someone that, in heaven, he would be talking forever because he likes talking so much, this man who does not have enough to say to fill a book.

…I would write about the sister of my friend, a professor of rhetoric, who used to tear out pages of books after reading them. She did this in the front row of her university classes, letting the pages drift down before the professor. I would write that my friend’s sister was a Zen master.

…I would write about enlightenment, without a capital “e," and I would write, “All humanity is waiting for it,” with a capital “A.”