California Girls Trip

The cravings just wouldn’t go away: Talavera, spiced Mexican chocolate, crashing Pacific waves and San Diego sunshine. I needed them like rare elements that need to be topped off every few years for my soul to keep running as designed. There is a branch of my family far out in the desert I hadn’t seen for decades, and long-time friends who are touchstones to former and future lives. So I picked my daughter up early from school on a Friday, sticky and grinning with a root beer float in her hand. We were both giddy with the promise of a week-long girls’ vacation stretched out before us. As soon as we arrived in LA, my exhausted 2am EST brain had to jump into navigating a rental car through the LAX-405 highway pretzel on a Friday night with coke-powered sportscars shooting past us at 90mph. My daughter’s playlist thumped against the limits of our speakers.  We headed straight East, away from city lights and into the relative darkness of the desert, as the traffic slowly thinned out and glided into calm.

We slipped into our friends’ home in Claremont long after midnight, taking such care to tiptoe that even Loki, their chihuahua-pug, didn’t hear us enter. When Loki discovered our presence in the morning, sniffing us through the closed guest bedroom door, her outraged bark sounded almost human: “What?!! What?!!” Clearly, she was offended we had managed to slip past her. Some treats and an early-morning pack walk mostly mollified her, though we still received some canine side-eye. Our walk through Claremont – made hazy and urgent by our need for coffee – was lined with old oak trees and xeriscapes full of desert rocks, wildly blooming succulents. Breezes carried the jasmine-gardenia scent of Tea Olive, a bush with small white clusters of blossoms and dark green waxy leaves I remembered seeing everywhere when I was younger. Citrus trees were weighed down with more limes and lemons than their owners could consume, falling to the ground in a ridiculous abundance that my newly frugal yankee self wanted to scoop up and turn into marmalade. Everything was much greener than I remembered. “We’re in an ‘atmospheric river,’” my friend explained. “Like a river of water in the sky. It was raining so hard last month that we couldn’t see across the street.”

Leaving Claremont, we saw that the mountains after which that town is named wore a heavy dusting of snow as they rose up bold and brilliant from the desert floor.  We headed deeper into the desert, through a pass lined with giant tumbling wind turbines, and then up through the winding Morongo canyon whose tufts of desert brush bloomed with a yellow halo. We passed the exit for Indio, where over a hundred thousand Coachella attendees were partying in the desert. When we stopped at a roadside stand to pick up a pint of fresh-cut watermelon sprinkled in lime juice we saw a few of the partygoers, dressed in fishnet shirts and other wild, rave-y clothes. But we had already passed up our rental car company’s “special offer” for tickets to join that crowd. My daughter had looked at young man behind the rental desk and told him plainly, “If I was going to Coachella, I wouldn’t be going with -her-,” gesturing towards me with her eyes. But, she told me later, she had no interest in attending. “Bad things happen at Coachella,” she cautioned. “It’s the sort of party that leads to regrets.”

Something of much more interest to her was waiting for us in Twentynine Palms. We pulled off the highway onto a dirt road that led to a Mustang Rescue Center. Two horse statues covered in silver glitter stood sentry by the gates. Staff ushered us in and told us where to find “Desert Daydream,” our canvas glamping tent. We unpacked and set up as horses snorted and a dusty sun set over the mountains of Joshua Tree National Park. Solar string lights popped on, ringing our campfire area. Tired from travel, we zipped up our tent, snuggled up under blankets and followed the darkness into sleep.

 

In the chill of morning, just as the sun was rising back up over the hills, we awoke to the sound of horses’ hooves. Mustangs were all around our tent: running, bucking, tossing their heads, and rearing up on their back legs to flail their front hooves at the rising sun. They moved like rebel spirits reveling in the joy of their own movement. We sat and watched them silently through the open tent. Later, when the center staff and their cattle dogs had finished rounding the escaped rescue horses back into their fenced area, we ventured out in search of food and coffee. We picked up a mocha and a cortada at an unassuming whitewashed adobe-style bar/café just off the main highway and went off in search of my uncle's family.

About 40 years ago, my uncle’s family had been at a campsite in this place – Joshua Tree National Park – when my cousin Laura disappeared. She had been one of the first “milk carton” kids, an adorable toddler whom witnesses thought might have been kidnapped by someone in a van. Our families and a bevy of volunteers searched the park for her, clambering over boulders and hiking through the brush, but she was never found. Her loss tore my uncle’s family apart in a way that only a family who has lost a child to violence or kidnapping can fully understand. My uncle’s family had since lived in many different places – Portland, Arizona, Grass Valley, Huntington Beach – but they had come back to this place, just miles from where Laura had gone missing. It was because my uncle’s family was so far out in the desert, and unable to travel, that it had been so long since I’d seen them in person. We greeted them with hugs and met their extended family of rescue pets. Then we picked up lunch and caravanned together into the park. We visited the Cholla (cactus) garden, saw valleys of Joshua trees standing like aliens with twisted limbs lifted in supplication, and climbed to the top of giant boulder piles. In the evening we picked up Mexican food and ate at their home, catching up on a long overdue span of family stories and bringing our understanding of each others’ divergent lives into a closer alignment.

 
The next day we left the desert and headed towards the beach town North of San Diego where I had grown up. On the way, we stopped at the San Diego Safari Park. I remembered it as so much larger, and the aviaries where I had remembered getting lost in a wonderland of colorful birds and tropical plants were all closed. But there was an entirely new “Australia” section with a stunning cactus garden, tree kangaroo and a platypus – rare to find outside of Australia. In the gorilla enclosure, a bored female demonstrated self-pleasuring techniques to the amused and embarrassed crowd while the males intermittently charged towards each other, beating their chests with cupped palms. We rode the tram through the safari park and might’ve gotten a bit carried away whispering and giggling after they told us they were using surrogates to reproduce white rhinos, because we couldn’t stop impersonating a hapless Coachella attendee, complete with valley girl accent, who made a wrong turn in the desert and wound up a rhino surrogate (yeah OK, you probably had to be there). Once we felt we had absorbed enough of the park, we drove down the “Del Dios” highway, where I had spent the most challenging hours of my driver’s education, and landed at the home of my childhood friend J.

It was the middle of the week, so my friends were working and their kids were all in school. We tried to tread lightly and be easy, helpful guests. During the day, Zora and I visited my childhood homes and special places. I told her the stories that attached me to those places. One was the Knorr Candle Factory, an enchanted store that is hard to find unless you know where to look. I used to buy colored sheets of rolled beeswax to make into candles, and they still had a small wall with cubbies of the colored sheets and wick for sale. We chose a couple colors to share with J’s kids, and Zora selected a few to make a braided candle at home. A beautiful succulent garden with trickling fountains and clusters of brightly painted Mexican pottery surrounded the store. We continued on to a boutique ice cream store that is part of a chain that runs up the west coast, and for which a Maine friend of ours is the Chief Development Officer. Afterwards we walked up Solano beach, stepping carefully around the thousands of wind sailor jellyfish (Vellela) that had washed up on the shoreline like indigo gummy beach stones. Surfers jockeyed for places at the break point, and I explained to Zora what I had learned in high school from my surfer boyfriend about the politics and protocols at a crowded surf site.  

When you return to a place that was significant in childhood it’s reassuring to find it relatively unchanged, serving as a stable anchor of memory. The sun was as bright and the sea air as fresh as I remembered. There were new stores filling in the streets, but the old ones were still standing with their rounded red clay roof tiles, their walls simply repainted with more modern colors than the 70s beiges I remembered. The tiny street where my first childhood home was located still felt like a country-hippie enclave. But there was one place that transported me straight back, with all the shock and tingle of an electric current running down a tree to ground at its root. It took just one sip of a Mexican hot chocolate mocha at Pannikin and I was young once again in body and soul: full of swirling complex thoughts, enchanted by French poetry and vintage dresses, and sliced deep by the keen blade of first love. It was a place relationships had begun and ended, a place where I had met to talk with people I wanted to know. The coffeehouse had a new dressing of lemon-colored awnings, but it was still an old train station with rough wooden beams and Talavera-tiled tables. Birds still flitted in and out, begging for pastry crumbs. You could still hear the train and smell the sea crashing against the nearby sandstone cliffs. I couldn’t have known, back in my youth, that drinking all those distinctive mochas would create a broad highway of memory allowing me to travel back in time, but it strikes me now as a fortunate investment of the few pennies I had to spend. Zora felt the magic too, making her own memories that blended with my stories as the coffee shop became a place we shared. We went back twice more, unable to stay away.

Our last two days were spent with my high school friend, A. She is now a doctor who lives in a beautiful home not far from where we both grew up. Her backyard is a wonderland with palm trees waving over fountains that spill down rock waterfalls into a clear blue pool and spa. She served us cardamom-rose tea and a beautiful middle-eastern breakfast with cucumbers, creamy white cheese, and brown lentils delicately spiced with Angelica. On one of our evenings, we met for dinner with our beloved high school French teacher, a truly vibrant person who has had an outsize impact on both our lives. Just as Beethoven struggled with hearing and Monet struggled with losing his sight, our teacher – whose heart was the true instrument of her work – had a heart that almost burst. Our teacher was in the hospital recovering from a long-shot heart surgery when A. discovered her on her patient list. Another former student had assisted during the surgery. All through high school, this teacher had given us pieces of her heart, and when it it almost broke it was her former students who helped piece it back together. Even more coincidentally, it was A’s recollection of something she had read in her high school French class that had secured her place in medical school many years ago. In an interview with the school’s imposing Chief Surgeon, he made a reference to the Myth of Sisyphus. A. asked whether he was referring to the myth itself or to the philosophical essay in French by Camus. In all his years, the Chief Surgeon told her, she was the first interviewee to have known about Camus' essay, and A. is certain that this was a critical factor in her acceptance. The essay's entire point is to accept the absurdity of life and not try to create meaning from it. Absurdly, now that essay itself is part of a story with deep meaning, tied to the improbable survival of our teacher and the lasting meaning she brought to our own lives.

In the end, what did our visit to So Cal accomplish? We strengthened ties with long-lost family and friends, showing up in person to testify to their importance in a way that words can never match. We fortified our own mother-daughter bond; Zora now knows where her mother comes from and how she was formed from the sun, sea and sagebrush. I ingested an adequate supply of the element “Californium” to last me through several more Maine winters.  Zora rediscovered her love of deserts and satisfied her longing for new foods & flavors. I feel more reconnected at the root and less likely to topple when the next ice storm weighs down my branches. That’s a hard benefit to quantify. But here I am, full of a rediscovered energy, and looking forward more than ever to the next half of my life.