He drove past lawns becoming straw in the summer heat. Dark-eyed swallows’ nests stared down at him from the overpass. The onramp lead past the irrigated suburban oasis to where the highway cut through hillsides alive with deer and quail.
He had wandered through chaparral like this before, his reverie always broken by cyclists racing down the trail in blurs of primary color. He drove on, thankful for the lack of commuter traffic, past boulders on the slope amidst sagebrush like eggs in nests. His car swam downstream and came upon a charred place of dead trees. It brought to mind younger memories of smoke blown downwind from Los Angeles wildfires: the warnings to stay indoors, the stillness of dead air in closed rooms, the ash like snowfall on the high school parking lot.
A bird black as a silhouette flew across the painted backdrop sky. His descent into the valley felt like another kind of flight and he flew dreamlike through Riverside County to the true desert.
White letters on a green background spelled “Cabazon,” home of the roadside dinosaurs that exerted a gravitational pull on the children of the family during visits to relatives in Phoenix. He had been there once as an adult, on an overcast day as gray as the Brontosaurus’s concrete hide. His childhood memories had it and the Tyrannosaurus Rex rising from the sand like the Colossus from the Mediterranean, an effect now greatly diminished by the proliferation of drive-thrus and gas stations in the creatures’ wakes. On that Brontosaurus-colored day young earth creationists sat behind tables between the creature’s tree trunk legs and handed out pamphlets showing a peaceful coexistence between dinosaurs and antediluvian man. The T. Rex’s paint peeled and metal bones poked through his cracked concrete exterior. He thought of the dinosaurs’ second extinction as he drove past the disenchanted place.
The sun shone overhead. The saguaros looked like Greek temple columns against the deep blue sky. He thought of the open space and dust-covered sepia photographs and pioneers bound for the seaside and the year-round summer. In his mind’s eye he saw first tumbleweeds and then a team of skeletal oxen pulling Conestoga wagons.
He randomly left the highway for an assemblage of buildings around its exit and drove past rusted car parts behind padlocked gates to a diner’s parking lot. The air smelled of coming rains. With the glinting noon chrome burned into his retina he walked inside and scanned the topography of the lemon meringue pie in the desert case. The unsmiling waitress told him that it wouldn’t be like Norman Rockwell. He wondered what financial problem or urgent family commitment kept a young lady like her here in this place. He looked out the window and saw the kind of rooster-topped weathervane that he imagined would have adorned a prairie house whose inhabitants tilled the thin soil. Taking this as the sought-after sign, he left a ten and two ones and drove.
Author’s Note: A brief, semi-autobiographical vignette; a prose poem about the California desert and/or the ‘Great American road trip.’