There is, at some point, a line whereby good taste moves into bad.
There are value meters operating in everyone’s head at any given time with rating needles moving from one to ten, good to bad, up or down simultaneously within many categories. The Happy Trails Resort is above 5 but less than 10 on most of my scales.
Yard decorations at Happy Trails, however, score ten and a half..
There are carved wooden bears that welcome you with open arms. There are pink flamingos that have eschewed the Florida Everglades for dry desert vistas. There are little plastic ducks circling the inside of birdbaths. There is Golf Ball Man waiting for his next shot, cow skulls painted like a woman’s nails, plastic flower gardens, wooden birds whose tails rotate as wind direction changes. Makeshift clotheslines reach across carports and golf carts are pulled into driveways as the preferred mode of transportation. Such devil may care decorating brings the best and worst from Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Oregon, Washington, California.
Saquaro cactus stand tall and in the evenings look like silent sentinels waiting for an Indian attack. There are stories from residents of bobcat sightings and unwary house cats being carried off in the clamped jaws of coyotes, never to be seen again.
Ages here hover around 70 and real estate signs pepper each street.
Few snowbirds stay through the summer with heat over a hundred and ten degrees. Those that do come out only in early morning or late evening. The rest of the day they spend checking stock portfolios, calling kids and grand kids, and fixing light meals in microwave ovens.
When you get old you don’t want to move randomly or carelessly.
You want to hunker down in a gated community and keep a loaded pistol on your nightstand.
I-10 takes you to Los Angeles if you stay on it all the way.
Out of Wilcox, Arizona the Interstate takes you along a steadily winding uphill road that goes from long flat expanses to foothills and into rugged mountains. Several miles before you get to Texas Canyon, a collection of rock formations that look like a group of dinosaur’s ridged backs, you come to a ghost town called Stein’s. There is a faded billboard promoting the place that has survived highway beautification and Ladybird Johnson.
Usually Stein’s has just been a glance to my right and is passed by. There is nothing here but old wood cabins, rusted machines, cactus, barbed wire fences and trailers for people who want to live away from other people because it is easier that way.
I drive over an overpass, follow a gravel road that ends at a closed chain link gate. There is a sign with red lettering that says the place is closed and two men inside the fence today are burning weeds and trying to get the best of their rakes and shovels.
“You closed?”
“They are,” one says, suspicious of my intentions.
“Good place for a movie shoot.”
“They did a few here,” comes a grunt, “but the highway noise makes it hard. Kills the sound man. ”
“Is the Museum open?”
“No, the owner’s husband was murdered here and it has been closed four years. She doesn’t know what she is going to do. ”
When a place has a population of two and one gets murdered you have devastation.
My love affair with Stein’s ends as quick as it began and I pull back out on the Interstate with relief, glad to leave the two prisoners to their work detail.
Stein’s is now in my rear view mirror and its history is sad.
It is just another comma in a long winded Faulkner novel where people are born, live, and die while moss grows thick in the trees and the difference between humans and animals is only razor thin.
Outside the Happy Trails Resort, to the southwest, is a nature preserve named the White Tank Mountains.
Whereas Surprise is a continuation of development, an encroachment upon the desert, the White Tank Mountains are resolutely clinging to nature. Within fifteen miles of Surprise, this preserve takes you into wilderness with some modern conveniences. There are picnic areas, a winding loop road that returns you to the visitor center, RV spaces for rent, clean bathrooms. Some of the trails are okay for patrons in wheelchairs or using canes, and on other trails you see mountain bikes, horseback riding, and hikers.
Leaving the visitor center and driving into the park, there is a pull off place for active souls who like to run, ride bikes, horseback, train for athletic events. This time of morning, on a weekday, there are only two cars in the parking lot when brother Alan and I pull in.
Walking the trail, it isn’t hard to imagine grizzled prospectors leading a donkey deep into the mountains looking for precious metals. It isn’t hard to imagine ranchers chasing down cattle or Indians fighting troops stationed at old time forts.
There are still places you can disappear in Arizona.
Staying on Pathways has always been difficult for me, but I am not the only one who has trouble walking a straight line.
Brothers keep us grounded by knowing who we used to be.
Golf and sunshine walk hand in hand in Arizona in 2015 like a retired couple on a perpetual honeymoon.
The Happy Trails RV Resort surrounds a golf course and its golf holes wind through the development like a snake doing a break dance. The greens are good but fairways need attention with new owners cutting doglegs to trim overhead and maximize profit.
Walking down streets named Trigger, Spur, Lariat, there are yard decorations in abundance.
In a golfing area, one is not surprised to find Golf Ball Man, a curious combination of super sized golf ball cells held together with wire skin and topped off with a driver, golf cap, sunglasses, and a determined look.
He shoots under par, sinks thirty foot down hill putts, has no trouble with sand shots, drives like a twisting desert dervish. If you ask him, he will tell you you have to give him five shots a nine plus one mulligan an eighteen. He can up the bet on the eighteenth hole if he chooses, and you can’t tee up your ball in the fairway.
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans are patron saints of this place but Golf Ball Man says his prayers in the pews.
At night I hear golf ball man practicing his putting, and, whistling, ” When the Saints, Go Marching in….. ”
Victoria Gardens is a Rancho Cucamonga mall, one of many in the Los Angeles area where shopping ranks high on people’s to do lists.
The day before Christmas, late afternoon, crowds are thinning. By now, most have their shopping complete and are winding home to pack, wrap, tie bows, slip their gift under a tree or drop it into a red sock hanging from fake fireplace mantles. On the outside wall of a mall store, the California Soul Records marquee is a synopsis of California.
The surf is here. The palm trees are here. The image of carefree living is here. The surfer is here. The feeling of comfort, washed out shirts and denims, short sleeves and caps is here. The effects of unlimited sun, salt, air, and wind have worked the images on the painted brick wall into something as comfortable as your favorite pair of shorts.
There might not have been a California Soul Records, but if there wasn’t, there should be.
This afternoon, Chris and I take photos for our future albums with this wall in the background.
When you are an imaginary recording star, with California Soul Records , looks are everything.
This afternoon I imagine Andy Warhol opening a can of Campbell soup, grasping it with a pair of channel locks,and warming it on a can of sterno by a Christmas tree on Wall Street
Finishing 2014 on the road, most of my past year didn’t end up on scotttreks, and that is good.
When I tuck a past year into the scrapbook, I’m okay if most of it doesn’t wake up again.
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