Until Santa Monica, where Lincoln walked me to Elephante. We ordered Saturday afternoon drinks and looked from the rooftop bar upon the green Pacific. There was no wind; the sunlight was its usual LA golden weirdness; the celebrities around us — aspiring celebrities — laughed with each other, looking up from their phones, with predatory enthusiasm.
I left LA late Sunday. Much of the drive to Arizona was done in darkness, but for the headlights of a 100 mile traffic jam that extended, as I saw it, from LA to Palm Springs. Through the car's speakers The Ends of the World now detailed with awestruck lyricism the Late-Permian mass extinction, when life on earth came within a whisker of expiring.
*
Three days later, in Wellton, east of Yuma, my father's wife, Micha, awoke with a terrible toothache and a swollen left cheek. She called her Mexican dentist. He couldn't see her for a week, he explained, overwhelmed as he was by the rush of American retirees come south for the winter. He prescribed some antibiotics, and we headed for the Mexican border.
Just north of San Luis, we paid $6 to park in an enormous chain-linked lot, among dozens of SUVs and Winnebagos and pickup trucks. I hadn't thought to come to Arizona with my passport, so I stood next to a foot ramp that led to the border and watched my stricken father — his back's flesh reassembled by 125 sutures: surgery for skin cancer — and his stricken sweetheart walk slowly into Mexico.
For 30 minutes I was on the phone with my friend Brad, who lives in Harlem. I told him, among other things, about the dozens of elderly Americans I was watching flow in and out of Mexico. They left the United States more or less emptyhanded — walked, limped, rolled in their wheelchairs — and returned carrying large purple bags of prescription drugs. The majority of them, I observed, appeared to have had their bodies ravaged, over the years, like my father, by America's diet. Some wore patriotic T-shirts or hats, and looking across the parking lot I saw a few trucks and Winnebagos flying American flags.
*
On Thursday night, Dad recommended that I return home via Highway 395, which runs along the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevadas. I contacted Sam in Chico and asked if it would be a good time for me to visit: 395 to Reno, then west on I-80, over Donner Pass, and north, through Yuba City, to Chico. Alas, he told me, as gently as possible: this being a three-day weekend — thanks to Veteran's Day — he needed, for the moment, some time with his friends.
The next morning, by the time I left Wellton, my little Miata's roof down, the Sonora Desert's air was November-harmless hot and the white-blue sky limitless, without clouds.
Heading west on I-8, I saw, on the other side of the freeway's high fence, a man, a woman, and two children sitting in the sand. Border Patrol officers stood at a distance, beside their green vehicles. I had for a moment the impression that they were all floating on the dunes, wind-caressed, cresting.
By afternoon, now well into California, west of Death Valley, it had become clear that I'd left Arizona too late: the Sierras, finally coming into view, were blocking the sunlight that would have permitted me to see their steep, youthful eastern-slope handsomeness. In shadow they towered, darkening. Soon, the air's high mountain cold forced me to put up my car's roof. I missed the view, I thought — the point of this detour. The world, but for the sky's mist of stars, had gone dark.
*
I stayed the night in Carson City, which my dad had long spoken of as lovely — his favorite city in all of Nevada. I found it full of strip malls, franchises, probably much changed from the town he'd known.
The next morning, the car's roof again down, I took Highway 88 west over the Sierras. Vast granite slopes, scooped by glaciers, cradling pines and high meadows, loomed on all sides, a dazzling, unlikely white. The light thickened as I westered. Leisurely retirees in their Winnebagos, of the same generation that I'd watched filing into Mexico, moved aside to let me pass. The mountains kept coming. The light clean, cleaning, endless sun, pristine —
Stopped now and then along the highway's edge, folks photographed little blue lakes or scanned a plateau's meadow for big horn sheep or black bears. The sky's enormity made smallness comforting. The earth, so old, I'd learned — life — survived, weathering.
Soon: descent, the Central Valley, civilization, and the dazed sensation one sometimes feels after what used to be called a religious experience.
