Desert Rattler: Electioneering
By Ken Layne
It’s the Sunday before Election Day, and I’m driving slow through a housing tract in Adelanto, a grim creosote flatland known for its collection of prisons if it’s known for anything. This is the northern frontier of Southern California subprime stucco sprawl, and it’s astounding how many of these 2006-vintage houses are vacant.
Some are boarded up, plywood sheets over busted windows. Some are trashed, with cheap broken furnishings dumped around the lot along with ripped-out sinks and shower doors. One looks as if a semitruck drove through the closed garage door – or, more likely, a U-Haul van slammed into it, by accident, driven by ruined people making a hasty retreat. Whoops.
But the evidence for most of the foreclosures is banal. Dead lawns. A court notice taped to the front door. Garbage cans stuffed yet never hauled out to the curb.
This street, it’s not a spectacular example of the collapse noted by the papers or network news. It’s just a development that caught my eye one afternoon, driving down Palmdale Road, because so much plywood is visible over the graffiti-covered concrete-block wall surrounding the tract.
But there is some human activity: A few guys in yellow shirts are canvassing the empty block, for Proposition 8, that anti-homosexual measure of such concern out here. Because there are four or five vacant houses between the occupied ones, a driver stops when he notices signs of life, and the two yellow-shirts hop out and knock on doors.
I get back on the main road, maddened by this idiocy, and turn into a strip mall parking lot, thinking I need coffee. But the mall is a tragedy, clumps of desert gangbangers and beggars standing pointlessly around the Rite Aid, huge pickups hauling huge trailers full of off-road buggies hogging the spaces around the fast-food cubes, and a sad-looking stray dog dodging between cars. With no collar and no hope, it looks like a tan-colored version of my own dog, when he was dumped at the end of a desert road years ago.
Weary of humanity, tired of politics, numb from the noise of a two-year campaign and all the screeching proletariat, I turn off the radio and drive down unknown roads. Eastward, up, away. There are still secrets to be found out here, if you drive far enough and then abandon the car and walk.
On the other side of Sycamore Rocks, at the top of Apple Valley’s semi-rural gridlock, I find a paved road that seems to end within a little mountain range I’ve never explored. No signs of houses up there, or anything, really. Just a railroad track alongside the asphalt.
Things are looking promising – there are no off-roaders out here, no piles of discarded tires and construction rubbish. I’ve wandered into secret wildlife refuges that appear on no standard maps, their very existence unspoken to prevent some ambitious redneck from emptying his guns into a herd of bighorn. Maybe this is such a place. The road winds through the foothills, Joshua trees appear with the elevation gain, and I crest the hill to see ... a gravel mine at the end of the road, the massive metal contraption sitting in a bowl carved out of the mountainside. So much for that.
Not every random drive around the desert ends with adventure. I turn on the radio and wonder where I might, finally, get that coffee. John McCain is on the satellite radio, barking at some people in New Hampshire. Bruce Springsteen is playing a concert to a million people somewhere, but they’ve really come to hear the main act, the other presidential candidate.
Sadly, I realize that same grim strip mall on the 395 is on the way home, too. I turn into the parking lot to get a cup of coffee. Two kids dart out and I stomp on the brakes. They’re chasing after a dog, that same sad-eyed brown hound. A little boy of about six, with jug ears and eyeglasses and freckles, and I guess his slightly older sister, with long flat hair and dirty pants. A teenaged girl in a Stater Bros. grocery apron is right behind them, trying to help.
I roll down the window. “I’ve got a leash in here.”
“We don’t have a collar,” the little girl says helplessly.
“Hang on, I’ll get him,” I say, figuring I’ll loop the end of the leash around his neck.
The boy staggers up to my window, suddenly sobbing so terribly that he has to repeat himself three times before I understand: “But our mom is way over there, at KFC!”
I park and grab the leash and a Tupperware bowl of water I keep for my own dog. But a beat-up maroon minivan is suddenly behind me, brakes squealing, a huge red-faced woman already out, screaming at the poor beast. “GET IN THE CAR YOU STUPID GODDAMNED DOG! BAD DOG!”
It shrinks and creeps to the open side door of the van, and she begins raining punches on its head.
Nothing can save this country.
Published: 11/06/2008
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good. real good.