The Sugar Beet

This Carousel Cafe I'm sitting in really is shaped like a carousel on the inside. It is a real diner, with the formica tables, the ugly seats, you know the ones, with the padding torn, and the over-lipsticked well-endowed waitress with bad teeth. The clientele is at least two generations older than me. Not a side of California that was in evidence back in LA. I'm in Twentynine Palms after deciding that LA just wasn't doing it for me. The only place I really wanted to go to was the Museum of Jurassic Technology and that wouldn't be open until Thursday afternoon, so I decided to not overstay the hospitality of Lisa and Courtney and left this morning. I was itching to get on to a more adventurous side of the trip and take that John Divola photograph of the isolated house.

I did think that I would have to traverse some dirt roads to get to the house itself and even then wasn't sure whether the house was on private property or whatnot. The 29 Palms Highway off I-10 is surprisingly quite busy, and the "town", as it said on the sign, of Yucca Valley has a population of over 20,000 and has all the amenities you could expect off a freeway. Even Sunfair Rd, which lead me almost directly to the house, was paved most of the way. When it did become dirt, it was extremely rutted and the car and my breakfast were jittered and jolted around like mad. I wasn't exactly sure I should be doing this in The Beast, seeing that it's a small Toyota Corolla. A Land Cruiser seemed more appropriate.

Whoa that's a lot of fries with my sandwich.

To continue, I managed to keep driving and driving and I felt perhaps the house was no longer there. I finally passed a road sign that I knew, so I knew I was on the right track and then I saw it or what I thought was it from the road. I drove a little bit more until I came to another sign I knew and was sure it had to be the house. I was a bit nervous by this time as there were some other houses around and I was worried about getting a flat from all the rocks on the dirt road. I hiked through the bushes and shrub, the lizards jumping from bush to bush as I approached, which made me jump a couple of times. I got to the house, and it looked abandoned, although there was a new metal screen door. I didn't walk right up to it as I saw curtains and didn't want to disturb someone, especially someone holding a shotgun. I took a few pictures, trying to remember the angle from the John Divola shot. The house was a bit run down, the paint peeling and trash outside. Somehow I was still more nervous than I really should have been but I expected at any moment someone to show up and ask me what I was doing. The house isn't very far from the Marine base, the largest in the country. As if to underline this point, four very large helicopters appeared in the distance as I was walking back to my car, and got quite loud as they got closer.

The original photograph


My attempts at recreating from memory
The other side

I'm not sure what to do next. I think I'm done with urban stuff for now but it seems churlish to ignore Vegas completely. I think I might take a little drive through the city, cross the Boulevard, and then stay for the night somewhere outside the city. I might stop and have dinner there. But tomorrow, more adventures as I toy with timezones in my drive through Monument Valley. This being because Arizona does not have daylight savings while Utah does, so I'll be gaining and losing an hour as I hop across the border and back. Hope my cell phone can keep up because I probably couldn't.

Lisa and Courtney were very nice throughout the trip, but also very busy. Nice young ladies, involved in the theater in one capacity or other. I also met Karen, a friend of theirs and another actress, the first night. She was a feisty one, unusual as all the other people I know from Idaho are a little more reserved. The only reason I mention her is that she wanted me to spread the word that the potato is not Idaho's largest agricultural export. It is actually the sugar beet. The Idaho potato is either a brand or a type of potato, and the largest exporter of Idaho potatoes is, yup, California. Now isn't that fascinating?


View Leg 3: Las Vegas in a larger map