I could hardly see the singular splash of color of the double-stack train stretching into endless golden oblivion. Traveling 75 miles per hour down the highway, the Union Pacific locomotive peeked between the hills, drawing ever further from my view. It would be a long time before our paths reconverged once again.
Taking the 58 out of Tehachapi was something I could do in my sleep by now. Slipping from beneath that little cradle in those kindling-dry hills dotted with Italian cypress, sempervirens, cousins of the coast redwood, cheap imitations of California’s beauty. Not enough rain here for anything quite so beautiful. Navigating through cookie-cutter suburbs past the German bakery onto the highway - perhaps I can stop another day - gusting winds held safely at bay through the chilled safety glass of the car’s windshield, sky lit up pink and gold by the setting sun obscured behind so many hills. Wind turbines sentinel-still, backlit in the resplendent glow, pyrophoric bursts of color and shaded, underexposed black. Another four-odd hours until I reach my destination.
The road rumbles under-wheel. Coming off a rough winter season, the roads always suffer the worst up here. I pray quietly that my car can endure, though it’s been through much worse. The wear-and-tear repair bills are never fun. The empty 1435 gauge track lies ahead, dipping out of the mountains for a brief moment - I’ve surpassed its traveler a while ago now. I can’t even see the headlights anymore, of the train or any other car. It’s to be expected. Sunsets around these parts are empty, most cars clearing off the road before the sun crosses the horizon for the first time. Either that or they only make it home mere hours before the sun rises once again. I fall into the latter category myself.
There’s something wrong about driving a car through the desert. Something beyond the obvious, something deeper still than just carbon dioxide by ton, dustings of heavy metal and the slow and steady buildup of rubber particulates along the highway, something even past the disturbance to bird migration patterns. There’s an unnaturality to it, an insulation from the visceral, an artificial safety tucked away in a nice and neat air-conditioned metal box. Hidden from the true nature of the desert with advanced suspension technology and refrigerant-compressor air conditioning. It’s as if it was never meant to be, as if we were never meant to tame such places, that one day the desert will take its due, and even then our technology will not be able to save us. But today is not that day.
I think of the younger me. The me that could run like hell through railroad ballast, leap onto a shipping container and catch herself against the cold steel hinge rods, the me that spent her free time in the outskirts of Tehachapi watching the trains roll by, hopping on one and taking a ride when I was sure nobody would see. Yeah, I was something of a trustie. Not that I’d let anyone else know it. Just needed to get some air, and I figured train hopping was the most thrilling way to get it. I think if my parents knew, they’d have killed me. But they never asked questions, and so I never had to provide answers. I don’t think they ever figured it out. I certainly would never tell them, least of all over tonight’s dinner. They’re the only reason I still come out this way, anyways.
I think the younger me is talking when I contemplate the desert, even now. She always had an appreciation for it, a longing to strike out into the world, past Mojave, past Edwards, past the boneyard - though it was hardly a boneyard then, past Lancaster and Palmdale and Bakersfield into the places where the canals flowed from and the land met the sea in a great divide. One day she caught a train as far as it would go and just kept walking past it, through endless orchards and farmland until she was picked up by a well-meaning police officer just outside of Pixley. They just chalked it up to her being an adventurous type.
She got her wish, though. Four long years of studying in Los Angeles and she was free to roam the desert and farther once again. The Mojave was her love then, and it still is mine now, and so what could we do but settle here? I like to think the desert nights haven’t lost their charm to me yet, but they were different from the top of a shipping container than they are now.
The cutoff onto the 14 has long since passed. I can see the lights of Lancaster in the distance as I draw closer to my destination. I’ve never enjoyed the city or the roads around it - always too much construction, too much damage, too much congestion. A microcosm of Los Angeles out here in a place that should know better. The 14 was the worst of it. Could ride it all the way into the city itself, though it would never get better. Watch the raw umber desert shift, lighten into something palatable and manmade, concrete-grey abominations raking the mountains. Even the Angeles National Forest was a shell of its former self. I can’t bring myself to go back.
Passing through the city itself, past the Skunkworks plant illuminated against the pitch-black sky as if to spit in the face of God, a 600 nanometer defiance of the natural order. Something or other could be heard in the distance, turbines spooling, doubtless spitting hot air over the runway across the plant. Maybe a JANET jet had just landed. It would certainly not be too out of the ordinary, all things considered. Despite it all, though, even the plant passed by along the side of the road.
The track is beside me now. Off to the left, straddling an empty lane, illuminated by the lights of the train in the distance. I am past it, now, having made good time through the hills and valley before entering the city proper, but not by so very much. I wonder if the driver recognized my car, the sole vehicle on the road, as the same one which had accompanied him all the way back in Tehachapi. More than likely not. I’ve always been told I have a talent for blending in, so to speak.
Through Palmdale now, that cookie-cutter city. Past Shell stations and B-1 Liquor, hair salons and shitty Chinese food. At least there were some people still out, to abate the odd loneliness gathered further back on the empty poorly-maintained roads. Though I rarely deign to admit it, their presence is somewhat comforting, but I know that such companionship can only be temporary, passing, drifting away once I leave the city’s marginally smoother asphalt and stark white streetlights. My parents would probably get a kick out of the comparison. Always telling me to settle down. Maybe someday, maybe someday.
Further along now, and the cars have long since left, abandoning my solitary pair of headlights into the black. I can’t see it, but know I’m coming up on Lake Los Angeles. What a sick joke of a place. Back in the 60s, they sold it as some kind of “resort paradise”, all the way out here in the middle of Antelope Valley. As if anything good could sprout up here. Pumped up the lake with water that should have been for truly anything else, and sold off all the property to people who had never even seen the place before. By the time the investors realized they’d been duped, the lake had dried up and nobody involved with the whole scam could be found. How uniquely Californian.
The lights of Victorville in the distance blend into an orange-white sea, minimal yet all-encompassing in the way that land occupies so little of the sea but stretches to each edge of a captain’s spyglass. My thoughts drift to a week spent in Morro Bay, sleeping under those same sodium vapor streetlights in my 1993 Honda Accord. She had a home to return to back in Tehachapi, but down there she had friends, views, and enough weed to keep her occupied. Definitely enough reason to sleep in my car or on a friend’s couch for a few days. The AC was broken and even the radio was intermittent, but that just meant she could admire the countryside in a truer, more intimate capacity.
I wonder what she had in mind for me now, all those years earlier. I can vaguely recall what she wanted for me. Something about ecological conservation. She stole away all the way to Pixley for the wildlife refuge there, pathetic though it may be, 15 year old brain intent on doing some work cleaning the place up under the cover of darkness. She forgot to bring spare batteries for her flashlight though, bringing a quick and disappointing end to that little misadventure.
I laugh to myself remembering such a silly story, hardly able to believe that I once was that naive. I’ve left Victorville, now, taking the 247 towards 29 Palms. ETA of about midnight, which is on track enough for firing schedules starting at 0130. Eager enough for a change of scenery, I switch the radio on.
The channel is already set to smooth jazz. I haven’t turned the radio on in months; no way was I expecting something like this. However, I certainly wasn’t going to change the station. The music seemed the very same that played in a bar outside Modesto - one where I met a beleaguered environmentalist. We had begun talking about conservation, and the work still left to be done by the generations who come after us. I started optimistic, my own fervor for natural restoration clouding my judgement. I proposed that each generation shows a greater zeal for protecting natural beauty, and that naturally it was only a matter of time before public consciousness had evolved enough to protect woodlands, wetlands, and all manner of endangered land and species in their entirety. It was there in that bar, the environmentalist - a few too many drinks deep - told me something that I could never forget.
I can no longer see the stars. Past the turnoff onto the 62, past 29 Palms, out into the wilderness where artillery shells hang in the air like migratory birds, casting sickly white-phosphorous glows onto barren hilltops, artificial 155 millimeter suns held aloft for two minutes a piece, burning out the night sky above. The cannon report echoes to here, the M777 eager to announce its presence, a baying bark belching annihilated gunpowder and black carbon dust. I’m early. I park my car, wrap a coat around my frame, and remove a pair of binoculars from the briefcase warming the passenger seat.
He asked me how the wilderness was different between when I was a kid and now. I told him about the steady decline, but how I hoped to help restore wetland habitat to its boundaries from before. I asked him why it mattered.
“Well,” he said, “how do you think it compares to where those boundaries were when I was born, as opposed to yourself?”
He was probably 30 years my senior at this point.
“I don’t really know.”
“How vibrant do you think it was?” he pressed.
“Like I said, I don’t really know. It must have been nice.”
“You don’t know the half of it. And that’s why it seems like this whole thing is doomed to fail.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how can you conserve what you can’t even conceive of? With every generation it just… backslides. We lose ground and can never make it back.”
The conversation stalled after that point. The environmentalist turned back for another whiskey sour while I finished my glass of beer, eyeing the jukebox for some kind of distraction, Bob Dylan echoing from the machine like a spectre. I don’t remember much from that night, but I do remember the environmentalist’s words to me.
I can’t help but think about the way the sunset looked from atop a shipping container on a southbound train to Santa Clarita, the last vestiges of the warmth of the day slipping below the hills as I pulled my jacket tighter around my body, sky lit up in gorgeous oranges and purples, like something right out of an art gallery. Like God had come down with a paintbrush and blended the colors Himself, just for me.
If I look just right, I can see some of the colors from that sunset in the last burning flares of phosphorescent flame, right before the candle burns out entirely and the shell impacts the desert below.