Two if by sea

My eyes have not seen many things cooler than what you see here.

Parked out in the desert by the entrance to Slab City at the time mine eyes beheld its glory, the busboat has it’s home port in Idaho. They tried to launch in Mexico, but ran into a storm of paperwork.

The skipper’s name could be Mike. That’s what the patch said on the blue overalls he was wearing. Then again, that just might be what the patch had to say.

They were running low on water. They carried Idaho hotsprings water with them to drink, and it was getting down there. Plus, all the border hassle. And they want to get home for Christmas. So they were on their way north to regroup.

Got it on there with a crane and were hoping to get it off with the lift at San Felipe, the only boat mover in the region on that side of Baja.

Or, he said, maybe they’d just back the whole thing into the water, let the boat float and the bus sink. But he was kidding. I think.

Salvation Mountain

I had another landmark conversation. Went like this: “Slab City? You don’t want to go there…it’s full of hippies and religious wackos…unless maybe that’s what you are.”

“Sir, I don’t care for your tone,” I told him. I was talking to a couple of duck hunters in the parking lot of a wildlife area.

I saw the Salton Sea on the map after I fled that godforsaken parking lot I had been sitting in for three days…looked online and found Slab City and Salvation Mountain. It’s described as a mecca for RV people and bursting with character. So I headed there.

But it was dark. I wasn’t sure where I was going, and overshot my turn by four miles once I found a patch of earth big enough to turn this aircraft carrier around.

Pulled off next to a hunter’s check station and walked to a brightly lit camp trailer, strung with Christmas lights. It looks occupied, but isn’t. The two duck hunters drive up, father and son. Dressed in full camo with the back of their truck filled with decoys.

They warn me off of Slab City and say, “Hell, you can come sit around our campfire if you want. You wouldn’t catch me going to that Slab City, nuh-uh…that’s where that missing girl last week was missing.”

I’m not clear on the missing girl…whether she was missed from there, found there…turns out it’s both. I look it up later and find that a young woman had been hanging out at Slab City, left there, her car broke down, she got a ride back to Slab City and then heard her car had been found and she was presumed missing. She called the sheriff to de-miss-tify herself. Case closed.

I thanked the duck hunters for their kind offer, spent the night in a parking lot marked out with firehose lines, then backtracked in the morning to Niland, California, took a left and went three miles to see Salvation Mountain and Slab City.

It’s a decommissioned military base, buildings torn down leaving concrete slabs that RVers like to park on, thus the name.

Salvation Mountain is a brightly painted folk art-looking religious monument created by Leonard Knight. You may remember Leonard, his mountain and Slab City from seeing them in the movie, ‘Into the Wild.’ Chris McCandless hung out here.

Well, the duck hunters are missing out. This place is more intriguing than anywhere I’ve been in a while and it turns out people really do find salvation at Salvation Mountain.

More on that later.

Stay between the lines

Notice, if you will, what these parking lot lines are composed of.

What you see there are old fire hoses. Smaller than fire department hoses, but of a size I’ve seen used for wildland firefighting.

Reducing, Reusing and Recycling is a good thing. I’m all for it.

But nailing fire hose into asphalt instead of painting lines? I just…it seems…never mind.

Masterpiece Conversation Theater

Spent three days in a parking lot. Waiting. Looking at the road atlas. Checking email. Calling back. Waiting for calls. Trying to arrange for a new owner to feel the love of the Minnie Winnie. But the title is still in Salem, Oregon, holding me up.

It’s been ‘processed.’ They cashed my check. But it takes five business days, I’m told, to be mailed. Of course. You don’t just throw something in the mail, all willy-nilly, when it’s ready to be mailed…you naturally wait – what? C’mon, DMV, get in the game.

So I sat in a parking lot. A strategic parking lot. Right next to Yuma. Free. Close to the Mexican border with bargains on hot sauce and off-brand dental care.

Met my neighbor, one motor home over. Nice guy. Likes to walk around a lot. Especially in the middle of the night, when he can’t sleep. Says that’s been an issue in the past when they stayed at the RV park adjacent to the border crossing, what with border patrol in their guard towers wanting to shoot him at 3 am and all.

He has sudden, extreme and aggressive hand gestures that don’t usually match what they’re illustrating. He’s a retired electrician, so he’ll be telling you about a broken neutral wire, then his hands fly out, abruptly – like they’re pantomiming a plane crash or the collision of subatomic particles on a grand scale – really fierce sweeping and jutting of the hands and arms. It looks like he’s fighting angry bees.

But he’s still telling you about one time when he put an electrical connection where somebody thought he wasn’t supposed to, but it turned out he was right and he could put it there after all. But with angry bee hand gestures.

So my favorite conversation was this one. We’re standing in that parking lot I hope I never see again, where RVs and longhaul truckers have been staying.

A semi truck pulls out. My associate comments on how that guy sure is loaded down.

Then this:

“Boy, those truckers…they sure do come and go a lot.”

I wish I did have to fend off a swarm of bees right then, just to distract myself from having to reply to that. I’m all for chit-chat, but it’s give and take, mister. You can’t say “truckers come and go a lot,” and look at me for reaction. That’s more of a definition than a statement. It’s not fair.

So I say, “And they’re always carrying stuff,” which isn’t true. Sometimes they’re empty, on their way to getting full to carry more stuff and keep on coming and going.

Not long after that I caught Bula banging her head against the Winnebago because she was so bored. I agreed. We got out of there and I’m now close to Slab City, a decommissioned military facility near the Salton Sea, home to a bunch of RVers out squatting on the concrete pads left behind.

All those people coming and going.

3,780 milliliters of Hot Castle Love

I’m set for life in the hot sauce department. Yessir, got me 3,780 milliliters of salsa picante.

I crossed the border into Algodones the other day to check out the dentist scene. There are forty-some clinics in four blocks and I have a chipped tooth I wanted to have looked at.

That first day I was just looking around, had a free exam and got some quotes, but crossed back over the border without having purchased anything.

The rest of the Americans and Canadians coming back had bags and bags of prescription medication, bottles of pure vanilla, which is a big deal here for some reason…liters of tequila, big huge souvenir sombreros and knock-off brand whatever.

The border guy looked at my passport, then asked what I was bringing back.

“Nothing,” I said.

He looked at my passport again, then asked me to step around the counter and empty my pockets.

“You went to Mexico for nothing?...what have you got in that pocket? And that one…put it all on the table…” Then he signaled to another border control officer to come over and help send me to prison.

“I have a chipped tooth,” I blurted out. “It’s in the back…it’s a molar.”

“Oh. A dental appointment. Why didn’t you say so? Welcome back. Have a nice day…Next.”

So the next time I crossed over into Algodones, it seemed in my best interest to buy something. And that’s when I found the mother of all hot sauce bottles. I haven’t tried this Castillo Amor brand, but I’m guessing it’s not very bueno.

Unless I’m mistaken, “Castillo Amor” translates as: “Castle Love,” which would also work for the title of a medieval romance novel.

It cost me four whole dollars, or 52 pesos, for this barrel of picante, and I love the fact that I now have enough hot sauce to invite several thousand people over for taco night.

The border guard took a look, said, “That is one big bottle of hot sauce,” then waved me right through.

You'll never get me to talk...OK, I'll talk

Any fool knows you try to make a good impression with a person about to stick a dental drill in your mouth. I’ve violated this basic rule twice in my life.

I used to have medical insurance, back when Oregon provided such a thing. You had to swear allegiance to the socialist party, naturally, but it was nice to have the option. Only certain dentists accepted this insurance, and I switched my plan to a new dentist who had the magazine ‘Wooden Boat’ in their waiting room. A friend suggested I’d like that better than reading copies of Good Housekeeping that were several years out, and I agreed.

But the Wooden Boat dentist dropped my plan, I got a sudden toothache and ended up in the chair of my original dentist. Just…I mean, just as he was leaning in to apply the drill, the receptionist bolted into the room, saying, ‘Stop…stop…I checked his policy and he switched to another dentist…’

Uncomfortable silence. The drill wound down and got quiet. The only sound was my saliva being sucked through the vacuum tube. Masked faces looked down at me. I tried to explain, with the tube still in my mouth, but “Wooden Boat magazine,” came out sounding like no language at all.

Bless him, this dentist, he said, ‘That’s OK, we’ve already started so we’ll sort it out later.’ And he was very gentle and it did get sorted out. I probably would have gone for a nerve if I was him, just as a lesson in loyalty.

Yesterday, I was in Algodones, Mexico. The name translates as: “where half of Canada and the U.S. go for dental work.” It’s a small border town, chock full of pharmacies and dentists. A porcelein crown runs about $800 to $1000 bucks in the states. Algodones $180 to $200.

I was just getting my teeth cleaned and a checkup, and right before we got started, the nice lady asked if I’d been down here long. “Oh, a couple of weeks. Traveling around.”

“Really? Where have you been traveling in Mexico?”

“Oh, no. Arizona.”

She laughed. Shook her head. Obviously not impressed with my gringo-centric lack of basic geography. Then she increased the rpm’s on the drill and said, “Open, please.”

You could hit the U.S. with a rock from the front door of her clinic. Not even a big rock. So I didn’t think it was entirely fair that I was about to have my nerve endings Dremeled for implying that forty feet inside of Mexico was the same as Arizona.

I tried to explain, but the assistant stuck the saliva vacuum in my mouth and the drill was revved.

She was also very kind and didn’t torture me. Which is good, because I would have told her everything.

...ssssshhhhhh....

There are two churches that made especially large deposits in my memory banks. Notre Dame, because the gargoyles were so freaky and also because, you know, it’s Notre Dame. And this one. In Sedona, Arizona. I came here with my folks years ago after we dropped my little sister and her stuff off at college in New Mexico.

Impressive, this Sedona chapel.

Back to Paris though. I got kicked out of the plaza in back of Notre Dame for taking a nap. I’d been inside, lit a candle and was taking everything in when a voice came over the loudspeakers inside.

Now, a disembodied voice in the house of the Lord automatically makes you pay attention, even if you can hear the static from what is obviously a PA system.

This voice said, and I quote: “…sssssshhhhhhh…sssssshhhhhhhh….”

It was a priest, or somebody, shushing everybody inside. And to be sure, there was some chitter chatter going on, and Notre Dame isn’t your standard tourist attraction. But the shushing went on for some time and it was, I don’t know, it wasn’t enhancing the experience.

So I went outside and sat on a bench in the sun, and it was warm and I was glad I was in Paris and next thing I know I’m being kicked in the shin by a gendarme, or whatever cops are called in France. I had nodded off in the sunbeam and miraculously hadn’t been robbed while I slept, I’m sure because of the refuge clause on church property. But I had to go.

I apologized and made a show of rubbing my eyes and making American hand gestures to make it clear that sort of nonsense wouldn’t happen again. I wasn’t done enjoying Notre Dame, and promised I wouldn’t nod off again. But I had to go. “Non,” he kept saying, pointing his nightstick at me, then the exit. I tried to reason with him using my limited French, replying, “…sssshhhhhh…ssssshhhhhhh….” but he wasn’t buying it. I was cast out from my bench in the sunbeam, gargoyles on the end of their gutters watching me leave.