The Five Corners of Love

#adventure, America, California, Travel, United States

Pt IV

California, I’m Coming Home.

Mono Lake lies far from the major urban centres of America’s most powerful and populous state, California. Economists reckon that standing alone on the world stage California would be nudging Britain for the fifth spot in the league of wealthiest nations. But unlike Britain with its Lake District, Mono Lake is no Lake Windermere. It’s mono, and not stereo lake, for a reason. Unlike the collegiate system of lakes dotting England’s northern Lake District, this ancient body of water is geology’s orphan. Isolated in a parched landscape, with no outlet for water to either drain and replenish, the lake long ago turned to bicarbonate of soda. What would the Lake District’s very own poet-laureate, William Wordsworth, have made of Mono Lake had he been there during a lifetime that coincided with one of the greatest movements of humanity in search of treasure without the traditional mayhem, piracy, plunder and pillage: the California Gold Rush of 1849? I’ll tell you what he would’ve done. He would have wandered lonely as a cloud, imitating the desert sky above, until standing there on the lake’s edge he would have muttered to himself – and I mean himself for there would have been no one around for miles and miles – what in God’s name is this i see before me? For once, words fail me.

Once Wordsworth had beheld these alien surroundings he would have shifted his emphasis. From aghast to agog, he would have repeated the sentiment that living in England’s Lake District had instilled in him: that Nature never did betray the heart that loved her. But it’s hard to love nature’s jagged edges. Romantic love of nature here is forsaken. Here on Highway 395, Eastern California, nature is elemental. Here the planet is as troubled as a teenager. Lifted, folded, exposed, hidden, the geology of Mono Lake is akin to that little blister on the skin of the Earth that, to heal itself, seeps clear serum from deep in the interior. Up from the deep interior superheated water fills the lake, changing the water chemistry and that of the rocks on which the lake rests. Not unlike what you see in the Apennines of Italy, cracks in the mantle let groundwater settle down deep before being pressurised by geothermal heat and pushed up to the surface where it does something to the limestone, spewing out carbonates that form towers of tufa in the centre of the lake. You’d think you were on top of Ol Doinyo Lengai, the mud volcano in East Africa. To look at it, you’d think Mono Lake was a volcanic caldera with whiteish scabrous deposits revealing its true Hadean nature broiling away beneath waters that above it appear so innocuous.

It is here we decide to remain for a couple of days. Finding a hostel not too far away, we sense magic in the air. Dave, the guy who lives in an annexe beside the hostel, quickly establishes his credentials as the most sardonic Californian you’ve never met. I’m thinking he’s learned the ropes from spending too much time in Northern pubs until he tells us he’s never been to Britain. Why then the phlegmatic humour? What comes out your mouth is too dark, too barbed, to be Californian with all that floodlit optimism that doesn’t lend itself well to cynicism. The enigma, which is Dave, then decides to take us to the lake for a hot bath.

Once there in nature’s open-air spa we form a circle of cynics. Dave says bathers have been scalded to death by moving all of 6-feet into what they thought was a harmless wet and warm zone when in fact the lake had undetectable hotspots where the water gushes up at over 70 degrees celsius, very possibly higher. I stay rooted to the spot afraid of turning my already burned skin into a whole new level of heat damage. Never before have i bathed in geothermal springs. The experience is unforgettable as it is unforgivable. The sun comes on like a thousand-watt bulb in a cubby hole. The sky is deeply blue. Not a single cloud wanders by high over. Never before have I felt nature burning me from beneath as from above. I have found home away from a home that failed to feel like a home. As my life will one day end, I know for a fact I’m going to like California. Sitting there in an open-air jacuzzi ringed by mountains the thought hits me: I feel good here. After waiting a lifetime to visit, the reality exceeds the expectations. And that doesn’t happen with everywhere we dream of travelling to. This state might just be golden, after all.

With the soda rinsed off our radiant bodies it’s time to move ever west to the world’s best-situated city, San Francisco. But not before climbing up and over America’s last barrier of rock and permafrost: the Sierra Nevadas. ‘Frisco is a Mecca for the godless. It’s where Steve McQueen just about drove his 1968 Ford Mustang off the brow of a hill and into the stratosphere. It’s where Dirty Harry cleaned the mean streets of limping serial killers. It’s where the Age of Aquarius was first entered. In short, it’s where the West ends and new promises begin. And for that reason alone it was worth the pilgrimage.

The Five Corners of Love

#adventure, America, California, environment, Travel

Pt III

United Across the Great Divide.

All the way to Reno……

…….I was looking to segue from the last instalment into this one after a hefty hiatus of eighteen months. Once the mothballs had settled I should have known that life lays down markers everywhere only to let the individual decide to see them for what they are or else ignore them for what they’re not. This ‘gift’ came wrapped in an R.E.M. song title. How does one get from Denver to San Francisco in a story without travelling a thousand rugged miles in words? Answer: one cheats by picking a song title which says it all. Hey now, all the way to Reno. If you’re old enough or urbane enough to be listening to REM, you’ll know the number.

All that my memories will reveal to me about the long bitumen from Colorado to beautiful California was that the I25 in Denver led due north to Cheyenne, the state capital of Wyoming. We must have doubled back from our pioneer hut in the Rockies to Denver knowing that to reach central California expeditiously we would be better suited to heading north to Cheyenne before taking a sharp left onto the I80 through the prairie lands of southern Wyoming. The car delivery operator gave us only fourteen days to cross the continent. Adding that failure to present ourselves and their car at our destination in Sacramento might result in an FBI warrant being issued in our names, was enough to keep us from digressing too much en route. No sacrilege on the road to the Sacrament, that was the mantra.

Southern Wyoming, I remember chiefly as being the gateway to the world’s oldest designated National Park. We even spotted roadsigns denoting so. For Yellowstone turn north. But turn we did not, in spite of temptation that Jesus could have empathised with. The detour would have added days to the trip, and quite possibly – in our callow minds – brought us into the FBI’s ambit alongside Colombian cartel lords, the Unibomber, and a splendid array of serial killers.

West we drove through a sea of yellowing grass stuck to hills filed down by the Earth’s master carpenter, time. Through Rawlins, Rock Springs and Evanston, and onward we hardly stopped even after crossing state lines into Utah. At Salt Lake City on the southeast shores of the Great Salt Lake we kept on the I80. The city of the Latter-Day Saints sat there piously wedged between a mountain ridges running north-south. I thought it was befitting of a religious colony of New World Christian non-conformists that they found their new Nazareth in a place so far removed by distance from the Holy land yet so near in terms of the harsh semi-desert terrain upon which Christ built his broad church. They choose one helluva place to settle into unorthodoxy. The Wasatch to the east and north; the Oquirrh to the west, both ranges rising from the valley floor, pushed up until their ridges cut the arid air. In the midst of untrammelled wilderness emerged over time a city as different from any other in the Continental United States that anyone could imagine. So improbable it would end up cemented there but that was the pioneer spirit of the brutal nineteenth century. Those religious zealots with the pioneer spirit welling up in their eyes, they must’ve marched in unison over forest, river prairie and mountain until stopping there with the Rockies towering either side of them they said, this is far enough.

Outside of SLC a vast salt flat shimmers on the horizon. The I80 slices through it, a gesture of unflappable self-confidence by American civil engineers of the mid-20th century. Then again, what else could they have done? Reroute the highway around the imposing site of a salt desert? Nah. Signs offering fuel and food warn of shortages ahead. No fuel beyond here for 100 miles. You get the idea. The heat was phenomenal, yet you wouldn’t have known it, so dry was the atmosphere. The skin burned without telling so. A gasp of air was all it took to singe whatever lines the windpipe. This is mirage country. The flats, where water once abounded, were now desiccated. Salt crystals is all that withstood the heat until turning the world white this bed of minerals reflected the sunlight back but the sunlight wouldn’t bounce back in a straight line. It swayed and wobbled instead, hence the hazy reality of looking through and beyond a salt desert. The trucks ahead looked for all the world as if shimmering through a wormhole, all pulled and stretched out of their normal dimensions, somehow levitating over a roiling sea of salt. The gum i had been chewing on melted onto the windscreen after a failed attempt at flicking out the gobbet of gum going at 60mph. That’s what i recall most: the sight of chewing gum turning to liquid on the outside windscreen, dripping down until realising it would take an ice storm to remove that careless blemish from this car.

And so the road went on. Straight as an arrow it cut through the dazzling flats until leaving them the mountains once again took us into their fold. But by then we had left one state and entered yet another, this time Nevada. Meaning ‘snowy’ in Spanish, Nevada was too baked by this ferocious summer to offer up snowflakes. But it mattered not. By now we had crossed the Great Diving Range and now could say confidently of ourselves, we have made it to the West, to Pacific Time. I don’t remember crossing Nevada on the I80 to Reno, the state capital. It was up and down, though that’s for sure. And because of plate tectonics, the ridges formed N-S, therefore when travelling west you go over every last buckle in the Earth’s crust. On the outskirts of Reno I sensed California was close. Roadsigns affirming such were all the evidence I needed to back my claims. The town itself looked like so many others en route: a pitstop; a temporary settlement in the most unlikely of places that found permanent status on account of the fact that wave after wave after wave of new world hopefuls had kept passing through on their way to the promised land of California only to get waylaid for long enough to put down some odd manner of roots.

It was at Reno we turned off the I80. Knowing we had time before the FBI were called in, we decided to take the back roads into California. Unbeknownst to us, this deviation into the magnificent unknown would meanaling delightful acquaintance with one of America’s truly great roads: Highway 395. Forget Route 66 or even Highway 61, this was the road that would leave an indelible mark on me, so much so that twenty-three years later i would return alone to do the whole thing again. This road had fable written all over it. Had a young a precocious Bob Dylan driven it before making Highway 61 Revisited, we would never have had Highway 61 Revisited.

Highway 395, if you didn’t already know, runs from Carson City near Lake Tahoe all the way to San Bernardino, east of L.A. It runs parallel with the backside of the Sierra Nevadas where grows the Giant Sequoia tree and in between there and the White Mountains where grows the ancient Bristlecone Pine. Between them are vast geographical features that battle the heat and the cold and the light and the dark. The heavens make Wagnerian cloud operas over this gap between two mountain ranges, such is the drama nature cooks up. It’s no coincidence that Edwards Airforce Base lies amid all this scale and all this splendour. Neither is it a surprise that Edwards Airforce Base is where the space shuttle would come into land. To slow from 17,500 mph to 200 you need acres of space to land, you need light to sight the shuttle as it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere, and you need high pressure, and lots of it, to mellow the bumps. Highway 395 and its back yard had it all. And smack bang in the midst of that lay Mono Lake, whose chemistry was most unusual, whose size was monumental, whose ambience was strange and beguiling.

When Order Threatens, It’s Time to Sow Chaos

Political Culture, Politics, United States

Does it really come as any surprise that Chairman Trump is shoring up the Pentagon with what he hopes will turn out to be the type of loyalists who don’t turn tail once the king takes a tumble? In a move which would be considered unorthodox in the hands of practically anyone other than The Donald, the Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, has had the hatchet job done unto him by the head of an outgoing government. Under normal circumstances you’d have to enquire why and what is the point, but norms of behaviour based upon the conventions of clear and rational thinking have been suspended in the USA, so we must assume there is an oblique point to this boardroom clear-out. Instead of winding down the hours, instead of packing his bags for a graceful departure, he’s playing a strategic game of chance wherein if he loads the judiciary and defence complex with enough lackeys and ideological soulmates, somehow the rug can be pulled from under the feet of the newly-elected and his potty period of rule can be extended long enough for a change in constitutional law allowing him a third and fourth term, which is only right and proper seeing that they guy is never going to perish like we mere mortals. Remember: old golfers never die; they just lose their balls. This guy? He won’t even lose his balls because they’ll be miraculously found on the green three-feet from the pin.

It’s a 21st century Viking saga of the 3C’s: Clinton, Covid and the Constitution. He beat two of them and by Jingo he’s going for a third. But to take on the constitution he’ll need Valhalla on his side. Immortality beckons. Failing that, he intends to succumb to a Scandinavian warrior’s death. His maternal genes are Scottish Western Isle, let’s not forget. What that means is that he’s got alchemy in his veins. Part-Pictish, Part-Norwegian Viking, Part-Celt. That’s DNA’s answer to hardcore. You can see it now. When eventually he does die he’ll be the one to decide. It’ll be on his terms. And the finale will be a spectacular, like the opening night of the Taj Mahal Casino in Jersey in 1990. Him lying there within his oversized suit, arms crossed in his favourite pose. His MAGA breastplate over his suit concealing his giant torso and his favourite 3 Wood resting gracefully in his cold, dead hands. The promise of joining the Pantheon with Odin and Thor ensuring a permanent smirk on his face. His crypt will be a Viking longboat doused in petrol. Millions of his dewy-eyed but vastly impoverished acolytes will surround the ceremonial long boat, still seduced by the simplicity of his message that ‘You are all great, and everything is great because I made it so with my genius, and things are going to keep being great so long as you keep me in the hot seat. Even though I’m dead.’

Melania will have split by then, taking her share of Louis XIV furniture back to Slovenia. Having said that, the kids will still be around fighting over which one gets to do the honours with the flaming torch, and which one gets to haul their beloved dad, who has now become ballast, in the boat out to sea where it will drift into eternity on a plastic aquatic wasteland he failed to tackle when he had the chance. A pity that, to Donald of the House of Orange, the threat of the Sixth Mass Extinction event wasn’t quite on a par with what the Trump image-makers at Fox News were nattering about on a daily basis. However, the prospect of his anointed burial at sea is a long way off, given that he’s got at least another three hundred years of bullying and getting away with blue murder in him.

So, what’s the score when a big-time loser is singularly determined to unshackle himself from the binding chains of loserdom? And do not underestimate the man’s determination. He is a legend among stubborn bastards with his Highlander blood up and his William Wallace-like ability to slither out of trouble when it comes calling. What’s more, that sheen you see him covered in when the limelight saturates him, that’s not the sweat of a man who knows justice is breathing down on him. That sheen is teflon, which somehow he managed to coat himself in sometime in the late eighties when women wore shoulders pads. We know that nothing sticks to teflon except teflon itself. Donald fights the auguries of misfortune by heaping on coat after coat of the stuff until he positively radiates plasticity. That with the hair that turns orange under the spotlight and back to blond when by rights a 74 year-old should be white all over, he’s the human equivalent of a chameleon, but not as cute.

So why purge the cabinet and the chiefs of staff when your goose is three-quarters cooked already? It doesn’t take a tactical wizard to work out that he has no intention of going. And even if deep down he knows not even his superhuman inner resolve can save the divine inheritance that most call the temporary job of being President, such is his spitefulness he’ll sow chaos, kick up hell, before he goes. He will gather his Praetorian rearguard and cram them into not any old position of power but positions of power that put the fear of death into fair-minded sorts: positions such as Supreme Court judge, Defense Secretary, Attorney General, or Chiefs of Staff. The guy wants supine loyalty more than anything. This is why Trump Organisation’s executive body consists of the fruit of his loins. Not even his own sperm would betray him, surely? But can these belated appointments – late substitutes in a game that’s surely already lost – really make a difference to the outcome of the election? Can the latest iteration of an employee roll-call that has seen more dismissals than managers at Real Madrid football club provide the steel he needs to stop it all from coming crashing down? Do they, his loyalist appointees, really believe in him? Would they lay down their political life for this soldier of fortune? Or are they wolves in sheep’s clothing, cheerleading him until his great spade of a back is turned, and only then the glint of blades?

Read anything about the Emperor Caligula and the analogies between him and Trump become apparent. Both men were born into powerful families before receiving short shrift from the establishment. Both survived where others didn’t, rising with a bit of help, into populist heroes worshipped by the proles. Both felt themselves to be outsiders miraculously emboldened to attack the very heart of senatorial power while capable of highly erratic behaviour. Caligula killed with extreme cruelty the people he blamed for the death of his loved ones; Trump has let his egotistical policymaking do the killing during the Pandemic. While the latter cannot carry a murder charge, both acted callously. Caligula humiliated the senators he saw filling a first century AD swamp. Trump’s Washington/liberal Media swamp was also targeted, even though his presence as the biggest toad of them all just toxified the swamp all the more.

Caligula, like Trump, surrounded himself with men he saw as a cloak of invincibility. A sociopathic absence of empathy tricked Caligula into thinking he was fine, even when he mocked and derided his senators and, tellingly, his head Praetorian Guard, Cassius Chaerea, for being a tough guy with a cissie’s voice. When Chaerea snapped and plunged a dagger into the space between Caligula’s neck and shoulder the others in their senatorial robes joined in the bloodbath. Will it be the same come the 20th January? Will he be shrugged off bloodlessly by men he thought had his back? Or will Trump be the one to carry out a bloodless coup? Will he become the latter-day Caligula who didn’t die young and spectacularly badly?

Time, as they say, will tell all.