white as frozen custard

First off, I'm back in Maryland, so this is all a look over my right shoulder. And I'm alive, so you can rest easy. I added pictures to things that needed pictures, starting with Los Angeles Is Cool. And I also added text here and there, so things aren't exactly the same. I'm not saying you need to reread everything, but, you know. If there's a photo it probably jogged my memory and I wrote something alongside it.

Where did I leave off? Oh, Las Cruces, banana splits in the hotel room.

The next morning I drove north. Here's the road there. They tested missiles and bombs and the like in the area.






I went to White Sands National Monument. Maybe not a surprise, but the sands are blinding, cream of wheat, Irish skin, when-doves-cry WHITE.

And as soft as a kitten. By this point my digital camera was no longer working. Sand in the lens, we figured. I bought some disposable cameras, made a promise to myself to not be stingy with film. Even still, it's a colossal disappointment.

Mostly because CVS tried their best to guess what I'm thinking. What a popular sport around these parts. So they made the white sands into yellow sands. I tried to fix the colors, but I don't own photoshop, and I have very few skills to speak of, so I did my best. As a result the white sands are a few different shades of white. Better photos can be found at the wikipedia article on the place.



Looks like I'm having fun! And that none of my clothes fit quite right?

I rented a sled from the gift shop. Actually, I bought one for $15, and if you keep your receipt they let you return it for $5. It's a ripoff, but you're helpless, because when in your life are you ever going to sled down white sand dunes?

The park is small but the hills make it feel spacious. Even when it was full of people, there was no problem finding an isolated hill to go down. I started small, on a little hill, but quickly learned that the steep hills were nothing to be afraid of. Steeper the better.

Walking through the dunes is tiring. When I was trekking up another hill, wondering whether my lack of breath was an accurate reflection of my health, a man on a motorcycle, about 50 yards away, asked me to pretend I was sledding so he could take a picture. Never mind that I was not really on top of a hill. I complied. Then he waved and drove away.

I continued. Imagine using a stairmaster in the desert--except the stairmaster is made out of soft, depthless sand. I got tired very quickly. I lay down to make a sand angel. I went down the dunes about 3 times. Seriously, that was all I could manage.

Later I went back to my car and discovered that my keys weren't in my pocket. So, awesome, they were somewhere in the desert. I was sure they were already five feet under the sand, buried by the wind. I calmly retraced my steps and they were in the spot where I collapsed and made a sand angel.

Not everyone rented a sled. One family just told the kids to rough it.



That little boy with his legs curled up in the air? I felt so bad for him. So when he came back up the hill I said, "You can borrow my sled if you take a picture of me when you're at the bottom. Deal?" He nodded in the way I imagine little boys do when talking to strange older women.



I wrote some postcards in the car. Then drove to nearby Alamogordo, where I could not find any atomic glass, though it was the only thing my dad asked me to bring back. I did get another banana split, though, from the same local chain that made the previous night's split. And I got my oil changed. While I waited I took a walk and did some word puzzles on a bench. A man asked me what I was doing and I told him the truth. It didn't seem to please him and he walked away, shaking his head.

What I should have done was waited inside the auto place, because they were showing Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I already watched a Harrison Ford movie earlier on the trip. I should have continued the trend.

I have no idea why I took this picture, but here it is:



Maybe it just seemed nice, somehow, that sad little American flag. The road out of Alamogordo, headed east, started in an environment that was the New Mexico I was used to. But then I climbed higher and higher through the mountains and trees started appearing. I went through lonely towns.

Near Elk, NM, I saw a lump on the side of the road and thought it was a hobo at first. But then it moved and ran across the road and I saw it was an elk! I didn't get a picture because I was too focused on not hitting it.

Then the land flattened out. I still felt like I was high up, somehow. I got that feeling sometimes in the West--I would be on a very flat space and still I was certain that I was on top of a plateau and that at any minute I would get to the edge and see a steep road leading down, towards the rest of the world below. Never happened. I did see a beautiful sunset that night, though. I felt at peace.



Here's a failed attempt to take a picture of a group of cows, to prove that they really do look like bears, sometimes.



Now that I'm back a handful of people have asked me, in some variation, if I found myself, or if I searched the entirety of my soul. I'm not really sure that I wanted to explore my soul on this trip. It's hard to say what I wanted. In my head the trip made such perfect sense that I often got frustrated with my inability to explain it to other people.

Here's another attempt. I just had the feeling that something more was out there. I wasn't looking for the meaning of life, or looking for something to give shape to my life. I just wanted to see what I already suspected was out there. It was as if I had already visited it all, but so long ago I barely remembered it, and I wanted to revisit and see things that would trigger long lost memories. If that makes a scrap of sense.

The East is very crowded and you go from one shopping plaza to another. Sometimes you go through little forests, and that's a nice feeling. But I imagined that the West was full of these big, open spaces that would take my breath away and replace it with an awesome peace. I was right. Seeing things was great, monuments and mountains and towns, but the spaces left the biggest impression on me.

I slept in Carlsbad, which is probably a great town if you want to go to the caverns. Otherwise, it's sort of a wasteland. I went to walmart for dinner, and bought three of my favorite items, to make up for the sort of lame motel I stayed in: Stouffers mac and cheese, a mango, and Little Debbie strawberry shortcake rolls. The latter are artificial and superdelicious, but I did once eat so many that it did prompt me to become a vegan for two weeks, a trial-run thing that I hoped would flush out my system of whatever is in those devilish little rolls.

rough it

Okay I'm in Houston and Rebecca is helping me figure out what, exactly, to write here.

Like, I'm a week behind or so, and what should be included?

Rebecca says that I should absolutely include the name of the muffler repair shop in El Centro, CA: Desert Muffler, motto, "No Muff Too Tuff." The man, Freddy, said to go to the restaurant two blocks down and he would call me there. I did, and he did, after I ordered a footlong breakfast burrito (chorizo, cheese, potatoes).

The muffler is fine, everyone, have a little faith. It was rusted from when my uncle owned the car and lived in Boston and the salt splashed up and ate it away.


I walked to the library, didn't update this blog. I think I just enjoyed being on the internet.


The ultimate irony is that El Centro, California, is the center of nothing at all. Not cultural or geographical.

I drove through Imperial Sands something or other, where they filmed the desert scenes of the original Star Wars pictures. This reminded me of Wylie's friend Charlie, who is a big Star Wars fan. We stayed at his house in Georgia, once, and we stayed in the Star Wars room. I have my own memories of Star Wars but Charlie came up. Wondered, Has he ever visited Imperial Sands? He should. Look at where the tall dunes meet the sky and expect C3PO and R2D2 to beep beep over the hills.




I spent the night near some petroglyphs in Arizona. I was supposed to pay $8 but I didn't, and I was paranoid. The wind was so incredibly strong that I couldn't pitch my pathetic childrens' tent. I slept in my car and that was okay, not great. I don't do well sleeping on a hard surface, though I wish I could. This night also marked the first occasion where I misplaced my keys in a serious way.

They were in my bra, in the end. But I was worried. I thought I had an extra, but I tried it out and it was for another car, my parents' Accord. So, shit.

Other times I have misplaced my keys:

-In the desert at White Sands National Monument. I found them on a hill where I attempted a sand-angel.
-In the trash in San Antonio KOA. I accidentally put them with a head of lettuce I was disposing.


You have to understand that this is pretty good for me. I lose things all the time, and I'm in the habit of checking for keys, wallet, phone each time I change locations. But still it's not enough. Well. I do okay. The key to life is just knowing your own limitations. One of mine is this: sometimes I put my keys in my bra for safekeeping and then completely forget about it.

I tried to cook the cactus at the painted rocks. But the wind was so strong that when I poured the gasoline into the cooker, the gasoline flew all over the cactus. Lucky that it didn't spill onto me, I guess. But it ruined my cactus!

There was a bathroom nearby but I tried to rough it behind a rock. I really wanted to. But the only place that provided enough cover from the two other RVs was located adjacent to a hole in the ground that looked like it might house a brown recluse spider. No roughing it.

This one will be shorter.

Wednesday, March 18

Asheville is a great town. Normal feeling but surrounded by mountains which impose a sense of importance. But then the people are incredibly laid back, so it all combines in an interesting way.

The sun rising over the mountains woke me up. "Hello, Liz," the sun said, "I'm so picturesque it's absurd!"



Felice and I left the animals at home and visited the Folk Art Museum. Surprisingly less dorky than it sounds, though Felice and I were the youngest there by a good 30 years. The featured exhibit was lace-making in progress.



(This is a pic from the internet.) Lace is made by maneuvering strings around different pins. The strings are attached to marked dowels. We were impressed. Then we saw one display that had unmarked dowels. Like, oh, you're so good you don't need marked dowels to make lace? Who do you think you are?

We took a long walk through the hills. It made me wish Asheville was flat and just surrounded by mountains. The walk felt like, I don't know--10 miles? It was probably only 1.5. I wore my converse and only got one small blister--a huge testament to the smartwool socks.

We passed the tiniest, cutest pomeranian puppy in the world. It squeezed through a 4-inch hole in a chain link fence. Felice put it back but it squeezed out again so she had to patch up the hole with a metal grate. I do not have a picture of it.

I made burritos for dinner, including an impromptu batch of I-hope-Chipotle-style rice. I remembered Rebecca's rhyme for successful Chipotle-style rice: "a little more time, a little more lime." Or it might have been "less." Or "more time, less lime." Whatever.