We drove south to Tucson and then east through the Sonora Desert. The Sonora is the desert we all think of as THE desert. It is the hottest of our American deserts, the one with all the cactuses that we know so well from the western movies. We visited my cousin Elise and her husband Carl who live near Tucson. I wrote re that last year here and here. The Tucson area is higher, greener and cooler than Phoenix, although both are in the same biome.
On the side is me with my new hat (purchased in Texas) in the desert. The hat is made of palm leaf and it really does keep the sun off and the head cool. I like it.
Just outside Tucson is the Saguaro National Park, where I took the pictures of the Sonora Desert vistas. The saguaro cactus is the one with the arms that looks like a man flexing his muscles. It takes many years for them to grow big enough to get arms. You can tell you are in the Sonora when you see the saguaro, which grow naturally nowhere else.
Above and below are Sonora landscapes
Below – the flat area behind the sign is – believe it or not – the continental divide. At some point out in that field, if you peed some would go toward the Pacific and some toward the Atlantic. We are actually at a fairly high elevation. It is just a flat plateau. I don’t know how exactly they can tell which way the water would flow. I always thought of the continental divide as a sort of ridge.
North and west of the Sonora is the Mojave Desert, which I wrote about last April, with its characteristic brush and Joshua Trees. You hit the Chihuahua Desert as you go east. It is not true that the Taco Bell dog’s wild ancestors roamed this region. The Chihuahua desert is theoretically less harsh, but it seems to have a little less interesting life. I guess that the Sonora is very harsh, but fairly consistent, which allows varied life forms to develop.
I don’t understand “good wine.” I tend to like sweeter wines, which are considered “cheap” and less classy. I also like the “oak” flavors. Chrissy and I went to the wine tasting at the Biltmore. They gave us a kind of a checklist. I thought that three of the wines were okay: a Biltmore Estate Chardonnay, a Riesling and something called Tempranillo. Some of the wines come from North Carolina grapes, but others are California wines according to the Biltmore recipe. I think that means that they put it in bottles at the estate. You got a special deal on three bottles, so Chrissy bought one of each.
I don’t know how they will be in larger quantities. Lots of things taste good in small amounts, like they give you on the tastings. But we got it now, so I guess I will see. I would have enjoyed a beer tasting. I know I like beer in larger quantities.
When I was in Warsaw I got to take part in a bourbon tasting, sponsored by Jim Beam. The organizers told us lots of stories and legends about bourbon and the various kinds of bourbon. I think they made some of them up, but they were good stories so why mess with the legends. You really can tell the black label from the white label bourbons, but only if you drink one right after the other. A good time was had by all. The Jim Beam guys were smart. They had a lot of their wares for sale and offered them while everyone was in the type of exuberant moods provoked by whiskey tasting. I bought three bottles of higher-class/higher-price bourbon than I would have normally.
I learned a little. Bourbon is aged in warmer places in North America. It is good to go in seven years. After that, it gets a little harsh. Scotch can be aged up to 18 years, since it is cooler in Scotland. But it doesn’t get any better after that. Actually it doesn’t get much better after 15 years, but paying more for anything over 18 years is a waste of money.
When there is a big industrial accident these days, the lawyers come out and drain any of the real emotion or truth out of the event and displace it with cash. In the old days, at least in the southern hills, they wrote a ballad. So it was when a train with Joseph A. (“Steve”) Broadey’s hand on the throttle plunged into a ravine near Danville, VA in 1903. Nine people were killed and seven injured in what the plaque called one of the worst railroad accidents in Virginia history. This is what they mean when they say you are heading for a train wreck.
I heard the song as a kid. My father’s version was sung by Boxcar Willie (I think), although there is a Hank Snow rendition and Hank was my father’s favorite singer. I thought it was just a song, not a real historical event, but it had some very precise lyrics. “They gave him his orders in Monroe Virginia saying ‘Steve you’re way behind time’” … “It’s a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville and a line on a three mile grade.”
So in the wonderful world of Internet, I checked it out and found out it was true, so when I drove through Lynchburg I went looking for the place. A couple people claimed to have written the lyrics. It was first recorded in 1924 and you can listen to the original version at this link.
All that is left now is this easily overlooked historical marker along a seedy patch of Highway 58 just to the west of Danville. There is nothing left of the trestle or the tracks and the ravine is overgrown with brush and vines. It must have been really big news around here in 1903, but more than 100 years later only the song abides. The picture of the train, BTW, is just a train crossing in Danville, unrelated to the Wreck of the Old 97, except that they are both trains.
Another thing about Danville is that it was the last capital of the Confederacy. This lasted literally only a matter of days, as Jeff Davis and his cabinet fled south, with Union troops in hot pursuit, after the defeat of Southern arms. Davis took up residence in the house of a prominent local man called William Sutherlin. Sutherlin made his money in the tobacco business and was a successful and flexible businessman both before and after the Civil War.
Davis was a great man, according to his lights, but he was misguided. Robert E Lee and Joe Johnston did the right thing and in April 1865 contributed to saving the United States and making it the country whose freedom we love today. Davis wanted to keep on fighting, even after Appomattox. At some point, hanging on stops being noble and becomes stupid, pernicious and immoral. I admire Lee & Johnston, Davis not so much. The guide treated Davis as a hero. I don’t agree.
Chrissy and I visited the house, an Italian style mansion. Pictures are above and below. The woman in the painting above fireplace is the Sutherlin’s daughter on her wedding day. The house is restored to the period of around the Civil War. You really get the old South feeling there. The Daughters of the Confederacy use the place for their meetings. One of the rooms is deeded over to them.
Religions, regions, firms, families, clubs and even individuals often have distinctive cultures that help determine the choices they make. You might object that these things are ephemeral, but all cultures are ephemeral. Some last a short time, some a long time, but none is forever. When we try to keep them as they are, we create either cultural museums or graveyards. America has been home to many cultures, many that you don’t notice toady because over time they melted into the American mainstream, making their contribution by not remaining separate. It is pluralism that worked for us.
Pluralism allows a variety of different philosophies and organization types to coexist, jostle together and produces disparate results that together are usually better than from what would seem a more logical planning process. It requires an acceptance of inequality and pluralism thrives when central governments exert only generalized authority (as was the case in the U.S. through much of our history.) Pluralism creates a kind of cultural marketplace of choice, where the most adaptive ones succeed and all of them collide, collaborate, combine and constantly change into something else.
Pluralism works because it allows the greater society to take advantage of productive arrangements and systems that might be destructive or dangerous if applied too widely or too long. The difference between a life giving medicine and a life taking poison is often in the dosage and the application. Pluralism allows us to take advantage of the positives of many systems w/o suffering the ill effects that would afflict us if they were widely applied. People can choose to live under particular rules that might be odious to others, and it works much better if one standard does not cover the whole society. We enjoy a kind of a la carte cultural menu in the U.S. We are free to copy the best and leave the rest. None of us has to keep all the aspects of the culture we were born into, and few of us do.
I thought about this as we visited Old Salem in Winston-Salem, NC. Many people confuse this Salem with Salem, MA famous for the witch trials. Both were founded by religious groups that followed a kind of a localized theocratic socialism, but they are otherwise not very similar.
Old Salem is something like Colonial Williamsburg on smaller scale. I found it really interesting because it told the story of the Moravian settlement. I knew almost nothing about that before. It is well worth the visit. The people who work there and play roles make products by hand using the old methods. But they don’t always remain strictly in character, which allows them to explain a little more about how things are. The gunsmith, for example, told us that there is a good demand for his custom products. Their products go to high end collectors and museums. The market is strong, he said.
The people who work there really seem to like their work. The guy in charge of the organ played us several of the pieces used in the churches and sang along. He had a good voice. Everybody enthusiastically told us about the history of their location and of the community in general.
Salem, NC was consciously founded as a commercial and agricultural colony of the Moravian protestant sect, which traces its roots to Jan Hus, a century before Martin Luther. They seem to have been practical people who sought the elegance of simplicity. Society was divided into groups, called choirs, based on status – young men, young women, male children, female children. married men, married women etc. When they died, they were buried according to their choir, not with their families. The graveyard, called God’s Acre, has flat tombstones, so that nobody is above anybody else. The Moravians clean the graves and scrub the stones each Easter.
The Moravians were good planners and were very well organized. They trained their people in useful trades and skills and produced simple but high quality products. One of the reenactors told us that Moravians supplied good products at reasonable prices and that they were honest. Having all three of those things at the same time was rare on the frontier. Their community prospered. Their location in the middle of North Carolina also contribute to their prosperity. It was right on the wagon road and had access to the growing North Carolina frontier, with its cheap land and good soils.
Organization was the key to success and organization and the needs of the community circumscribed personal choice. Boys were trained in trades, which were chosen for them by the church authorities, so that supply of labor met demand. Nobody could actually own land in Salem; it was all leased from the church and held on conditions of good behavior, including attending church and living a moral life. Women could marry when they were eighteen. Men could marry when they could demonstrate the ability to support a family. A man would build a shop and a home and then petition the church for permission to marry. He could submit a specific name if he had a girl in mind, but that match might not be approved. If he didn’t know any girls he especially liked, he could make a generic request and the church authorities made suggestions.
People like the Moravians made very valuable contributions to the development of North Carolina and to America, but most of us would not want to live under their strict rules, nor would those rules necessarily be adaptable to a wider society or changing conditions. In a pluralistic society, they were able to survive and prosper with the implicit conditions that they produce something useful for the wider America. W/o access to political power, they could not impose their views outside the fold. In fact, the ultimate punishment for those who consistently did not play by the rules was to be kicked out of the community. In other words, at base it was a free-choice association. You could leave if you didn’t agree and you could be forced to leave is others didn’t agree with you.
In a pluralistic society, individuals have the right to belong to whatever group that you want provided they will take you. All the individuals involved have the choice and they have to work out the particular relationships. It has to do with freedom of assembly. You can choose your friends and associates and should not be forced into any group membership. Groups themselves have no right to exist beyond the choices of their individual members. This is an important distinction. Pluralism as we have used it empowers individuals to be members of groups of their choice. If you empower groups over individuals you have a type of corporatism or fascism.
There were advantages and disadvantages to being a member. Leaving out the spiritual benefits, which believers would have considered the most important aspect of their lives, on the pragmatic side members, on average, were more prosperous than their similarly situated neighbors. Of course, they had to accept the strict rules, which included devoting large parts of your income, energy and time to the collective and one of the important reasons behind their success was their adherence to the rules. Would it be considered unfair that others couldn’t get the advantages w/o buying the whole organization?
Pluralism demands diversity and requires inequality of results. These are the things that choice will inevitably produce. We sacrifice pluralism and choice in exchange for greater equality. This may be a wise decision at times, but we should be aware of what we are doing – getting and giving up – and not hide it by misusing terms like diversity or multiculturalism. It should be about choice to the extent possible and that means picking up both ends of the stick and living with the results of our poor choices as well as our good ones.
The pictures are from around Old Salem. They include the gun smith, the organ master and some of the buildings. The flowers and the flowering tree are catalpa. They are also called Indian cigar trees, because of the long seed pods. I took a picture of this tree because it was so full of flowers and unusually beautiful.
The Biltmore is the biggest house in America, built by George Vanderbilt in the 1890s. It is part of a enormous estate. When Chrissy & I toured the house, the gardens and the general area, it changed our point of view a little. An estate this size is not all about the owners and it is not really about a house as a place to live.
The first thing I noticed is how much the place resembles a hotel. Hotels tended to copy many aspects of these mansions. The “winter dining room” at the Biltmore is a classier version of the Holidomes I used to like so much at Holiday Inns. Beyond that, these big houses were a lot like hotels in their functions. They were set up to host, entertain and feed guests with a large staff devoted to doing it.
The second thing I noticed is how much the owners of this estate played their role. The Vanderbilts always seemed to be on stage. They changed their clothes dozens of times a day. There were specialty clothes for walking in the eating each of the meals, playing tennis, sitting in the library or walking in the garden. Below is the gate to the Estate. After you pass through the gate, it still takes you around 15 minutes to drive to the actual estate buildings.
My first impulse was to dislike the Vanderbilts because they had piles of money and engaged in conspicuous consumption on a grand scale. But they did a lot of good with the money too. This massive investment in the hills of North Carolina employed lots of people and not only maids, butlers and kitchen staff. Building the place required a massive labor force, as did building and maintaining the gardens. Of course those things are still a type of consumption. But the estate also included working farms and forests. Some of the science of forestry was invented on the estate. Gifford Pincot, the father of American forestry worked here. I learned how to use a “Biltmore stick” to estimate timber volume when I studied forestry in college. I never knew were the word came from. I guess I just figured it was named after some guy named Biltmore. It was named after the estate because its use originate here.
Fredrick Law Olmsted designed the gardens, the same landscape architect who designed Central Park in New York. He also designed some parks in Milwaukee, including West Park (which became Washington Park), Riverside Park and Lake Park. Olmsted was expert in the use of water in the landscape. Above is a bridge over the bass pond he created at the end of the garden. Below is the rose garden.
You couldn’t take pictures in the house. It was a nice place. As I said, it reminded me of a nice hotel, so if you have been in a nice hotel, you have an idea. It must have been really impressive 100 years ago. Today we are accustomed to big buildings (like hotels). At the time the Biltmore had new innovations such as electricity, indoor bathrooms and refrigeration. Now everybody has those things. The rich today can live a very opulent life, but the practical difference between being rich and poor is smaller because being poor is a lot less miserable than it used to be.
I don’t much like coffee, but I like cream and sugar mixed with coffee. I am especially fond of the French vanilla cream, but I put so much of it in that I need a strong coffee to stand up to it. IMO, the best coffee for my purposes is the Sumatra coffee at Pilot. Pilot is a truck stop station, which usually has the least expensive gas on the highway. The bathrooms are clean and they are usually lively places, so I stop at Pilot whenever it is reasonably convenient.
McDonald’s is okay in moderation
Above is the McDonald’s in Asheville, one of the fancier McDonald’s I have visited. It was hosting lots of old people while we were there. My father always complained about old people when he used to shop at Pic-n-Save. He said they were so slow and they always just stood around in the way. And I used to make fun of him. Maybe you have to be almost old yourself to make these kinds of judgments because I am beginning to understand his point. It took ten minutes to get at the straws, napkins and catchup. Evidently how many napkins to take and whether or not you need a straw is a decision that requires more thought than some people can give it in less time.
I have been eating at McDonald’s since HS. They used to give you a free Big-Mac for every A you got, which was a good marketing strategy. I didn’t get many free Big-Macs, but I did get to think they were good. Some people go on about fast food being bad for you, but it doesn’t hurt in moderation. “Nothing too much” is a good life guide. I used to have a minor cholesterol problem, but then I got a low dose of Lipitor and the problem was solved. Any problem you can afford to buy off is not a problem; it is merely an expense. I call my daily dose of Lipitor my “cheeseburger tax.” Maybe someday it will kill me, but not today.
Granny’s Country Kitchen
It isn’t always fast food. Other food can have lots of calories and cholesterol. We stopped off at Granny’s Kitchen just past Hickory, NC. Chrissy & I both had the pulled pork and French fries. Chrissy didn’t eat all of hers, so I helped out. We have been trying to go to local restaurants when we travel to get a little more of the local flavor. The trouble is that there is less & less local flavor that is worth eating unless you have inside local knowledge. Various franchises are pushing them out or at least away from the places convenient to the major highways.
Boutique hotels
We stayed at the Grand Bohemian hotel near the Biltmore Estate. It is in the Biltmore Village, a kind of ersatz central European hamlet set the southern hills. The Grand Bohemian is part of the Marriott’s “Signature Collection” of boutique hotels, i.e. ostensibly ones with special or unique character. It is different, but I don’t know that I like the character. It is European-like and made to look like a hunting lodge. I used to visit one like it near Bielsko in Poland. That one was used by the Hapsburgs in the 19th Century. It had character and I liked it. But the one in Asheville is not a hunting lodge. Hunting lodges are set out in the forests and fields. This one is surrounded by busy roads … and the ersatz village.
These Central European style buildings are just not suited to the Carolina climate. They are designed to hold heat and support roaring fires. These are things that are not really appropriate in North Carolina. It doesn’t get very cold around here, but it is hot and humid a good part of the year. Of course, our modern society defeats the weather with air conditioning, but still it looks funny all buttoned up in a hot climate.
Weird weakness
The hotel has a nice health center, however. I don’t use treadmills very much. I prefer just to go outside and run. But these had TVs attached, so you could just walk along and watch TV rather than couch potato it. I lifted some of the weights. Something strange happened last week. My right arm got 1/3 weaker. I noticed I was bit clumsy and when I tried to use the one-hand weights, I found that my right arm couldn’t do curls with 45 lbs, as usual. My left arm did okay with the 45lb (which I have been using for 30 years BTW), but with the right I could do only 30lbs. Otherwise it was normal, just a lot weaker, but really only with the curls. I can still do chin-ups and presses. It also sometimes has that tingling feeling, like when you sleep on it. If it doesn’t get better maybe I will have it checked out.
We left the Joshua Tree National Park and keep on going on a little road toward the Salton Sea. (Above is Interstate 10 in the distance.) The area is below sea level and w/o irrigation it is a hot and desolate place. With irrigation, it is a hot and productive place. This is the Imperial Valley, one of the most bountiful agricultural areas in the world, where a lot of our lettuce, grapes, berries and broccoli come from.
The Salton Sea is a fascinating accident related to the irrigation. In 1904 the irrigation dikes broke and almost all the water from the flow of Colorado River poured into the below-sea-level desert depression for almost three years. The escaping water had created a vast fresh-water lake. It is so big that you cannot see across it. Had they not fixed the dike, the Colorado River probably might have simply changed course and eventually found its way to the Gulf of California by alternate means. (This, BTW, happened periodically with the Mississippi. If not for human intervention, the Mississippi probably now be following the route of the Atchafalaya River, bypassing New Orleans.) Geologists say that the Salton Sea has been formed and dried up many times in the past w/o the intervention of man. You can see the Salton Sea chronology at this link.
At first it was great. People put in fish and the bred fast in the warm and empty waters. But the water in the Salton Sea didn’t stay fresh for long. The salts and minerals from the lake bottom soon dissolved in the water and with no outlet to the ocean, it was in the same situation as the Dead Sea. It is getting saltier and saltier. Many of the fish are dying out. The only ones still thriving are tilapia, which can survive almost anywhere if the water is warm enough and are now being used for cat food.
The dying of the Salton Sea is a problem from several points of view. Migratory birds have become very fond of using the Salton Sea as a stopover. If it becomes a dead sea, it cannot serve that purpose. The State of California is trying to “save” the place, but it is hard to see what they could do, short of breaching the dikes again and sucking in the Colorado River. It “benefits” from some irrigation discharge, but this is not water of the highest purity. The Salton Sea is essentially a big puddle, with no reliable sources of replenishment or discharge. It is a very temporary lake and in a moment of geological time it will return to its former condition.
We almost got to Mexico on the last leg of the day’s journey. We caught I-8 in El Centro, California. Not too far along the road, we were stopped at an immigration checkpoint. I didn’t know they had such things except at the border.
The road to San Diego is very interesting. The first set of mountains look like a pile of stones. If you didn’t know better and they weren’t so massive, you would think that humans dumped and piled these rocks. It just doesn’t look natural. As I wrote earlier, the wind really blows out here. They have signs on the roads warning about the high winds. The winds sandblast the rocks, and everything else, and knock off the rough edges.
As we got farther west, the mountains became green and beautiful. In other seasons the grass is probably brown, or golden as the Chamber of Commerce might describe it, but the green was really nice. Below is another picture of Chrissy. Sorry to post so many, but she looks good and really liked the car.
We ended up at the Courtyard Marriott at Liberty Station.This used to be a Naval Training base and now it has been redeveloped into hotels, shops and restaurants. It is very pleasant if a bit too neat, see below. Chrissy has already left for Washington. My flight is a little latter so I am writing this at the airport.It has been an interesting visit to California.
The only place Joshua trees grow is in parts of the Mojave Desert, on elevations from 2000-6000 feet, and their highest concentration is where they are protected in the Joshua Tree National Park. This is high desert and cooler than the Sonora Deserts lower down and farther south. You pass through the transition zone between these two biomes as you drive south across the park. From the north you cross a vast expanse of Joshua tree savanna.
Joshua trees are a type of yucca. They don’t grow like ordinary trees, with rings marking each year’s growth, so it is hard to tell how old individuals are. They don’t get very tall. They look sort of like crazy people waving at you. This seems to confirm one of the stories about how they got their names. The story goes that early Mormon settlers thought the trees looked like Joshua welcoming them to the Promised Land. They were also sometimes called desert oranges. This story says that land sellers wanted to entice settlers to this barren land, so they not only implied that these were productive fruit trees, but even went around and tied some oranges to the trees near the roads. It evidently didn’t fool anybody.
The landscape is beautiful in that harsh sort of way, a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here. We were seeing it at its best time. Spring rains have made it greener than usual. The day was very windy, which I understand is fairly common. That is why they have all those windmills nearby. It also explains the sculptured roundness of the rock outcroppings: natural sandblasting smooths off the rough edges.
The Joshua trees dominate the open spaces, but in among the rock outcroppings you find pinion pine, California juniper and scrub oak. These communities are under some stress, however. The climate was wetter until the 1930s. The same hot and dry conditions that provoked the dust bowl affected the local climate. I couldn’t find out details about this, but evidently the previous relatively more verdant environment did not return. There are hot/dry and cool/moist cycles in climatic patterns and this could not have been anything new to the plant and animal communities.
The difference may have been human development. Cattle grazing took out some of the natural cover and made it less resistant to the changes. But the bigger problem seems to be invasive species, such as cheatgrass. These things deliver a double punch. During wetter periods, they fill in below and among the pines and oak. In drier times, they die back, but don’t quickly decompose. This makes wildfires hotter and more destructive, which kills some of the trees that would have otherwise survived. When the area regenerates, these non-native grasses form a thick layer of turf that makes it harder for the pine and oak seedlings to get a roothold. This is not a very generous environment and there are not that many second chances.
IMO, the native environment is better than what we will get if we let the invasive take over, but it will be sustainable only with a little human intervention and probably chemical warfare. BasF makes a good herbicide that can take out cheat-grass and its ilk, while leaving the oaks and pines intact. This should probably be done periodically. I don’t know if it is. I would get more involved if I lived nearby. This is certainly an environment worth saving. Doing nothing is not a good option.
Above – Joshua Tree NP is a favorite for rock climbers. Below is a lake made by ranchers for cattle by building a dam at a runoff point.
Below is the dam holding back the water. The little lake has become a major wildlife attraction, as one of the only steady water sources in this arid place.
I wasn’t allowed to take a picture of the most interesting part at the Palm Springs Art Museum. The guard literally stopped me just before I pushed the button. He claimed it was because the artist has not given permission and I can well understand why. If I produced art like that I also would not want to allow evidence. It was a stack of black garbage bags. I have seen such installations before, but never in a museum. This guy evidently got paid for putting them there. Usually they only pay when somebody takes them away.
Some of the other art was very good, like the cowboy sculpture in the picture. These places are nice to have in a town. It adds a certain spiritual/artistic dimension. But sometimes we suffer from the “Emperor’s New Clothes” phenomenon. Garbage bags are interesting, but they are not art.
Below is a statue of a chameleon at Marriott. This is nice art, but not considered “fine” since it is inexpensive and common.
Below is a street in Palm Springs. Some of the stores and restaurants have some misting. In a dry climate, it really cools it down at street level.
Below is real art. This is a man-made landscape set in nature’s valley. Very nice. Notice the way to clouds sit on the mountains. I think those are the Santa Rosa Mountains. The moist air cannot make it over the summits, so on the one side it is wet, cooler and cloudy. On the other side, it is dry, hot and clear deserts.
You can share the same country, the same physical space, with people and live in completely different environments. I focus on historical or natural scenes and I find them wherever I go. So when I go to crowded California I find the empty beaches, forests and green vistas. That is what I look for, and that is what I find.
Not everybody sees the things the way I do. I see trees. Maybe they see buildings or cars. I saw signs for ethnic areas of LA – Korea town, Philippine Town, Little Armenia … We drove past these things at high speed and never experienced anything other than the signs. Well, maybe not high speed.
Another thing I rarely experience is traffic. I ride my bike or take the Metro to work, so traffic for me is sometimes a weekend choice. I thought about this as we inched through the LA traffic – and this wasn’t even during rush hour and it was mostly moving. This is a daily experience for many people. The only time I got stuck in traffic regularly was when I lived in New Hampshire and commuted to Tufts University in Medford, MA. I didn’t like it, although I listened to a lot of audio books. I found that thoughts of traffic started to dominate my thinking. Commuting can be an overwhelming experience,
I thought about how different life if you live in a beach community as we walked around our hotel in Ventura. You can see Ventura just above. The picture at the very top is Carlsbad. It is more or less a beachfront retirement community. It was founded in the 1880s as a spa and has some Euro-pretensions as a result. Ventura and Carlsbad are very different.
Many of the houses near the beach in Ventura probably started out as shacks or weekend cottages and gradually evolved into homes. My “baby-boom” generation was probably the pioneers here and many seem to have aged in place. We saw a couple really old looking hippies. It was probably really cool to hang out at the beach when they were young. Add thirty years and thirty pounds and the picture changes. Look at the second picture down and you can see one of the “outdoorsmen” in his temporary camp on the park picnic table. Notice, he has brought along his fishing gear. There was a orderliness to his possessions that implied that he was out there as much by choice as by compulsion.
The next day we ended up in Palm Springs and another reality. Palm Springs is an upscale community with lots of ties to celebrities. We drove along Frank Sinatra Avenue, past streets named for Bob Hope, Dinah Shore, Gerald Ford and Gene Autry. I have never been here before, but it was familiar because of the sixties television. If you lived here, you could probably play golf and go to shows and galleries every day. That would be another interesting reality.
Of course, last week I was on the Marine base at Camp Pendleton and we go back to Virginia on Friday. These lives intersect only occasionally. Usually they just run parallel. But in the meantime, Chrissy is still having fun with the rental car and I am enjoying the hot whirlpool below. Actually, it was a little too hot at first. But this is something we haven’t done since the kids were little, when it still made a difference if I got my hair wet. Life is good for now.
