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Barstow

Mars Surface Winds Generating "Dust Devils".

I've been transfixed by this view of the martian landscape all day. Just a simple dust storm across the surface of a small red dot in my sky. It's worse than any given day in Barstow, but theres nowhere else I'd really rather be than where this picture was taken.

Lately I've noticed myself thinking about space more than usual. It's probably because of the discovery of an "earth like" planet in the star system Gliese 581. When I heard the news ,almost knee-jerk like I said out loud "alright! now we've got somewhere to go!".

What a weird reaction to have to such a small bit of information. Some astronomer announces that they've seen what appears to be a small speck of light, they look at the data and decide that its a planet almost like ours, and the next thing you know I'm standing in my garage packing for the trip.

It's almost like some deep part of me really needs to know that there is a frontier somewhere, anywhere just to be able to feel normal.

Living in a world as we do today, where tourists can and do go to the furthest reaches of the planet, seems to bother me more than I realized. The ability to "get away" has been a part of every generation of humans; that is, until now.

My dad used to say that the reason that there were humans on every continent and seemingly behind every hill on the planet was because as a species we were wired in our DNA to get as far away from our inlaws as possible. From the beginning of time back on the savannahs of africa, generation after generation of human newlyweds kept hoping to move just far enough away from their inlaws so they could visit around the holidays, but far enough apart to give themselves a good excuse to leave early to "beat the traffic". On and on it went, generation after generation all of them moving further out on the horizon until every 'nook and cranny' of every spot on the globe had been reached and populated by someone else's relatives.

It was a good system and it worked for a very long time, but things have changed for us. Now there is no frontier, no place you can go to get away from anyone else their relatives or yours - ever. Cellphones reach every spot on the globe at all hours of the day or night and everyone lives with the expectation of "instant real time" communication. You don't answer your phone on the first ring and people think its an insult.

I can remember when the words "Live Via Satellite" meant something really really big was going on. Now it just means theres a wrestlin' match on 'teevee'.

Thanks to the 'Jet Age', you are 14 hours from any spot on the globe and when you get there, you'll be met at the airport by a cabbie wearing an NYPD t-shirt, carrying an I-pod and yes, carrying a cellphone that was probably made in Finland.

Trade and travel restrictions are more liberal than they have been in the history of mankind. Wars, famile and pestilence, where they occur are regional and small in nature by comparison to almost any time in the past. So who is it on the plane with you while you travel? Yes thats right, just about anyone else in the world, because where travel used to be a sign of sophistication or at the very least someone rich with some scandal to hide but it's now just a sign that you've got $1000 dollars buring a hole in your sweatpants.

Now dont get me wrong, these are all good things and I'm all for seeing and visting all parts and peoples of the world but I got to tell you, there are times when I want to go somewhere where there is ZERO expectation that anyone can find me with my cellphone, someplace where no one has ever heard of Britney Spears or is populated by anyone who uses the phrase "Carbon Neutral".

There are days that I would really like to go somewhere else.

I went somewhere else twice in my life, and both of those places are gone now, overrun with the tracks of civilization. Places where people just didnt go back then are now places where elderly retirees can drive their RV's in safety and comfort.

Way back in my youth, I once took an epic trip down the Baja Pennisula. I was in the process of a divorce from what would soon be my first wife, and I found myself also between jobs( and yet, this was not the worst year of my life. It wasnt even close, so for those of you feeling down in the dumps for your situations, keep you chin up. Things got much worse and much better as I moved on through life ).

One of my cousins and a couple of his friends were going fishing along the coast of Baja and I decided that since I had nothing else to do that I would go along. Fishing trip? It was more like a trip into the distant past via "The Time Tunnel".

The road down the Baja pennisula, if you could call it that, ended just a few miles outside of Ensenada, and was replaced with a few miles of 55 gallon drum heads. Then it was dirt, gravel and little else. There were no GPS, no highway patrol, no gas stations every exit, hell there were no exits.

You were on you own. There was the four of us at ages between 20 to 24, A Ford Bronco and a 68 Chevy Truck, spare tires, tools, fishing gear and thats about it. There was no expectation of help if anything went wrong, if you got hurt, you died. If the truck broke down and couldnt be repaired, it would probably stay where it broke down if we couldnt fix it.

We were completely on our own. We were for all intents and purposes living in the 18th century. We were on our own in a way you can't hardly do anymore. We went days without seen any signs of human habitation. We slept right on the beaches. We fished all day and moved along down the coast, completely losing track of time and dates.

It was fantastic.

On rare occasion we would find a small town or a village, but they werent the sort of airconditioned, franchised "rubber tomahawk and sombrero" places you see today. These were places where people lived and fished and went about their lives, somewhat oblivious to the outside world that we lived in.

About half way through the trip, we saw a set of telephone poles leading to a small village and decided to stop. We took a seat at the bar and ordered food as a change of pace from what we ate on the beach. Then we asked if we could use the phone. The owner just pointed us to the pay phone on the wall. My cousin walked over to use it and discovered that there was no dial tone.

He asked the owner when the phone would be repaired. The owner said he had no idea, that no one in the town had any use for the phone. Then my cousin asked if he knew what caused it to be out and the owner just pointed at the lobster traps that were stacked against the wall.

Lobster traps, that were clearly made of untwisted telephone cabling. We stuck out head out of the open air bar and followed the phone lines and sure enough about a half mile down from the town there was a big gap between two poles. The Federal Government of Mexico had wished to provide telephone services for the people of Baja, but the people of this part of the coast of Baja had found the phone lines to be put to better use then asking other people "hey watcha doin...".

"Who are we going to call? Everyone we know lives here! " the owner of the bar said to us. You really couldn't argue with that, its just the way it was. Who needs a phone, we got everything right here in river city big fellah...

After we had gone as far down Baja as we could, we took a ferry over to the mainland. What looked to be a quick half day trip instead took two agonizing days to cross, as the ferry broke down in mid crossing with ourselves and five other trucks on board. The Gulf of California was absolutely becalmed, not so much as a ripple on the water and no discernable horizon due to the dust and haze which sounds like loads of fun until you realize that there was no way to drive off the smell of the stench from the ferry, which was a lukewarm heated combination of tuna parts, cigar butts, vomit, diesel oil and chemical toilet effluent. Once it gets on you, there's not enough Lava soap in the world to get that smell off of you. To this day, I can't eat tuna fish without thinking of the 300 lb. Captain of the ferry laughing at us from the wheelhouse and eating his cigar at the same time while we sat there in the middle of nowhere and waited for the tug to find us and bring us in. The Mexican Anti-"Captain Ahab", not chasing anything around "perditions flame" but just sitting up in the wheelhouse, eating cigars and spitting tobacco down at the deck and the passengers below for sport.

We arrived on the Mexican mainland and after showering in an actual hotel, with running water and yes, a telephone that actually worked and we drove back to "El Norte", and crossed the Sonoran desert in the process.

That my friends, is a serious desert.

Oh, it might be hot and dry where you live, but compared to the Sonoran desert out around the Colorado River Delta, it might as well be Louisiana wherever you are.

We stopped in the desert at one point to deal with a mechanical problem. The Chevy had blown the last of its tires, and we need to send the Bronco ahead to get the last tire repaired. I stayed behind with one of the other guys to watch the truck as the rest went on ahead to the next town.

At night in the desert there wasn't a sound. I mean not a solitary sound. It was the sound of the absence of all living things. Occasionally the truck would make some sort of noise due to the cooling of the various metals causing a small clank here or there, but that's it. You could quite literally hear your own heart beat out there. It was the most "empty" and the most "nothing" I've ever been in.

It was fantastic.

Since that trip my contention has been that anyone who crosses the Sonora desert by foot with the only thing keeping them going is that simple desire of coming across to the United States; if thats the case they should be met at the border with a wet towel, a large glass of lemonade and we should just sign them in right then and there and give them the oath of citizenship.

Anyone who crosses that place on foot and survives is ok by me. we'll work on that whole 50 states and capitals civics test later...

When we crossed the border back into the US at Calexico, we faced returning to a world run by the clock and the calendar rather than one run by the seasons and the tide. There was no getting away from it, no matter where you went, there you were and someone else knew it. The world we left behind on that trip might as well have been the world that Cortez and his men found when they arrived in the new world. It probably hadnt changed all that much since that time.

But its all gone now. Baja now has a nice asphalt paved highway that goes all the way down to Cabo San Lucas. The road south of Ensenada is no longer "the gates of the anitpodes" but the first of many PEMEX stations and McDonalds all along the route. On a road that my friends and I once agonized over possibly losing a tire or puncturing an oil pan because there was no expeactation of help of any kind, now average Americans from LA suburbia drive their Honda Accords and Civics in air conditioned comfort down to places all along the coast, Kayaking and talking about the natural beauty of all that they see.

The Mexican Federales now have check stations to make sure you make it safely all along the route. What the hell is that all about? Safely? Federales? When I went down Baja, I wept when I saw a barbwire fence, because I knew it meant that someone was possibly around the area.

And now there's cell phone towers all along the route.

Blasphemy...

The blessed emptyness of it all is now interrupted by stupid ring tones and people saying "Hey watcha doin..." at any hour day and night, just because they can.

Where's the sport in that? You can't get truly lost today of all you have to do is reach into your pocket and say "Mom, come get me..."

So I look at the animated "gif" at the top of this post thats been provided by SETI and NASA and I swoon for the possibility of blessed emptyness and I know how much I personally really need the concept of frontier. Because from some of us, its not enough to just get away from our inlaws. We need to maintain our own sense of our humanity by leaving it behind to go see whats on the other side of the hill. That hill, right there behind that "dust devil". I wonder whats over there...

Were just wired for that sort of thing, I think.

Posted @ April 29, 2007 10:09 PM | Current Affairs

Posted by: Ken at May 2, 2007 09:26 PM

Posted by: frank martin at May 2, 2007 09:37 PM