Escape from California

BLYTHE

The city limit sign lists the population of Blythe as over 21,000.  My wife finds this hard to believe, and I remind her that the count includes the inmates of Ironwood and Chuckawalla Valley state prisons, some 20 miles outside town in the desert sands, amidst the rattlesnakes and scorpions.

When we pass the “do not pick up hitchhikers” sign, a plea to avoid inadvertently abetting prison escapees, my wife confesses that she always wanted to stop and take a photo of me sticking out my thumb in front of the sign.

The weird feeling in the pit of my stomach when we exit Interstate 10 at Lovekin Boulevard betrays my discomfort at even being here.  I don’t belong here anymore.  I’m not sure whether this is more return of the prodigal or return to the scene of the crime.

For three years and three months, I lived and worked in this remote outpost on the Colorado River, managing a branch of the county court located 90 miles across the desert from anything approaching civilization.  We stuck it out by spending weekends in Phoenix or in the Coachella Valley or in Nevada.  Those years were particularly hard on my wife, who wasn’t working and was a twelve hour drive away from her family.  Even though we were in the middle of nowhere, at least I was employed and was able to pay the bills.  Until suddenly I wasn’t, caught in a spate of layoffs resulting from the court’s budget shortfall.

There was one restaurant in town that we particularly enjoyed back then, and we stopped to have lunch and reminisce.

“How long have we been gone?” asked my wife as we munched on chips and salsa.

I had to go back and count.  “It was six years at the end of September,” I finally announced.

We saw no one we knew in the restaurant, but the waitress said she remembered us.  Indeed, nothing had changed.  Same line of customers waiting for tables at lunchtime, same amazing food, same servers.

Blythe is one of those places where time stands still.  When we arrived in 2010, the movie theater was still open.  My wife attended a matinee the first month we lived in town.  And then the theater promptly went out of business.  Ten years later, the movie theater sign still stands, advertising the arcade and ice cream parlor that once were inside this air conditioned oasis in the desert.  On the marquis by the road, instead of announcing the movie currently being shown, the sign still reads “theater available.”  After a decade, the space remains empty and unused.

Blythe is such a sad little town.  The Foster Freeze is boarded up; more storefronts are now vacant.  The cool 60 degree temperature in January hides what residents know all too well, that 100 to 120 degrees is the norm every day for seven months out of the year.

We get back on the freeway and head east over the Colorado River and into Arizona.  We take Exit 1 in Ehrenberg, just one mile from Blythe, but in another state where the gasoline at the Flying J truck stop is a dollar a gallon cheaper than it is just across the bridge.

The clocks on our phones jump ahead an hour.  We are on Mountain Time now, having finally escaped California.

Desert Dreams

INDIO

Residents of the San Francisco Bay area often describe their location as “northern California,” thus distinguishing themselves from the Los Angeles area residents of “southern California.”  Nevertheless, I would suggest that the real “northern California” consists of the forgotten one-third of the state stretching from Sacramento to the Oregon border.  For those of us who call home somewhere between the redwood coast and the Sierra Nevadas, southern California doesn’t seem quite real, particularly during our cold, rainy, snowy, decidedly un-Californialike winters.  The drive from the piney north to the Inland Empire and the Sonoran Desert beyond seems like a journey across multiple nations to a distant part of the continent.  The map’s insistence that I have not left my home state is incredible, some sort of tall tale that necessarily involves the suspension of disbelief.

I once lived here, in the bleak emptiness beyond the enormous windmills of the Cabazon Pass that invoke images of Cervantes by day and blink their red lights in unison, like so many Christmas tree toppers, to warn off low-flying planes by night.  A quick gust of wind blows sand across the freeway, while out of the corner of an eye, I barely detect a jackrabbit scurrying out of sight.  As Michigan did to Simon and Garfunkle, the desert seems like a dream to me now.

I awake from the dream in a Motel 6 in Indio.  Being away from home in a strange bed often leaves me sleepless, but after a twelve hour drive, sleep quickly overtakes me until I open my eyes with a jolt at three in the morning.  Having slept deeply, I don’t need a psychoanalyst to tell me that the dream I remember hails from somewhere deep in my subconscious.
Back in 1970, we lacked even an inkling of the technology we take for granted today.  Still, I dream that, back in elementary school, I text my teacher what I am too embarrassed to tell her in person, that I am ashamed that I have no clothes that fit me properly.

I have been obese since early childhood, a situation that proved far more challenging decades ago than it does now.  Then, we didn’t have a Wal-Mart in every town where you can purchase size 4X and 5X shirts right off the rack.  If you needed huge pants to accommodate tree trunk legs, your only hope was the local Army-Navy store, and even then, you might be out of luck.  For fat kids like myself, everything you wore was always too tight.  Boys with incipient man-boobs well-outlined by too small shirts would be taunted as really being girls.  Sooner or later, you knew you’d bust a seam and your pants would split at school.

I dream I am reading our hometown newspaper in my parents’ living room, where I learn that the township has allocated funds to purchase tent material and tentmaking supplies to provide poor families with rough-hewn clothes large enough to properly cover their fat children.

No doubt this improbable dream is based on the fact that my father, taking me clothes shopping and coming up empty-handed, would often laughingly  tell the salesperson that he would need to visit Ahmed the tent-maker to order custom garments large enough to fit me.

I begin to see a theme coming together here.  Despite ordering clothes online and having them altered, even today most if what I wear fits poorly.  And so, as I head east on I-10 into Arizona today, if from somewhere across the sand beyond the roadside saguaros I spy Ahmed approaching on camelback, I will surely stop and submit myself to his measuring tape.

Keep an eye out for me, Ahmed.  I’ll be in the red Kia Soul.  

Just tell me you take Visa.

This is Your Chance, Nancy Pelosi. Please Don’t Blow It.

From President Trump to my wife, there seem to be a lot of people around who have come to despise House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi.  Regardless of what you may think of her, however, I submit that her withholding of the articles of impeachment against President Trump is nothing less than a stroke of political genius.

Some ask why Pelosi didn’t send them to the Senate for trial immediately.  To put it bluntly, why should she?  By holding on to them, she has everything to gain and nothing to lose.  After all, the Constitution does not speak to timing.  Article 2, Section 4 merely provides that the president shall be removed upon impeachment and conviction.  It can happen any old time, or not at all.  There is no law prohibiting abandonment of the process following impeachment.  Or postponing a trial for an extended period of time, for that matter.

So why are the House Dems waiting?  Supposedly to establish rules of procedure in the Senate that assure a fair trial.  By that standard, I figured the Senate would be waiting a while.  But now it seems that the House might give in and bring over the articles of impeachment to the Senate after all.  Say it ain’t so, Nancy!

We have senators who openly confess that they have no intention of being fair and impartial jurors at the president’s trial.  In such an atmosphere, House reluctance to submit the articles of impeachment to what they view as a “kangaroo court” should come as no surprise.  Think of it:  The Senate, if it so chooses, can proceed without allowing any evidence to be submitted or any witnesses to testify.  The Senate gets to establish its own rules of engagement, which may be similar to those used at Bill Clinton’s trial, or not.  One thing is a virtual certainty:  With the president’s own party in the majority in the Senate, there is little incentive to adopt any rules that bear the potential to bring to light any evidence of the president’s commission of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”  Party politics, not justice, appears to be the order of the day.

My father says that the bitterness between Republicans and Democrats, the acrimony that has wiped out artificial gentility and even a pretense of desire to achieve neutrality and fairness, has rendered our government into that of a third world country.  He may be on to something there. Why is it necessary for the Republican majority Senate to waste valuable time and resources in holding a trial when it already knows that the articles of impeachment are a sham and that the president is innocent of all charges?  Don’t bother with witnesses, evidence, or any of the trappings of modern justice.  Third world, indeed.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he is perfectly content with Pelosi holding onto the articles of impeachment because he’s not eager to hold a trial of the president in any event.  The Senate has plenty of other work to do without such distractions.

Pelosi and McConnell should shake hands and concede at least one point of rare bilateral agreement.  Then we can proceed with the presidential election and deprive Trump of the ability to gloat over an acquittal in the Senate.

McConnell has said that Pelosi and the House have the right to change their minds about the articles of impeachment.  Sure, he’s framing his argument in terms that make House Democrats look foolish.  I say let him do that.  Any way you look at it, it’s a win-win situation.  No dog and pony show, no show trial, no fait accompli acquittal, and no travesty of American justice.  The fact of the House’s impeachment should be enough.

Please, Nancy, don’t blow it.