by Neil Peart
You’d like this town, too. Three thousand people, many Tarahumara indígenas (handsome people, with dark coppery skin, resembling the old pictures you see of Apaches), at 7,670 feet, with the smell of the sawmill, wood fires, and lots of little restaurants. A few decent motel-type places, too, as it’s a main stop on the Copper Canyon railway, and the main entrance to the park. Lots more to do and see around here. So hurry up!
A funny moment at Moto Altavista: while they prepared my bill, I was standing outside having a smoke, and when they said it was ready, I asked if it was alright to smoke inside.
Erik laughed and said, “This is Mexico — you can smoke in a hospital here!”
Right on.
I had a bad moment over dinner last night, when they were showing the movie Grease on the TV in the dining room. That had been one of Selena’s favorite movies, and it soon had me in tears. Somebody seemed to read my mind and came and changed it.
Then this morning they were showing the funerals of those teens killed in Colorado, which made me sad and teary all over again. Ach.
Holiday Inn, Deming, NM
Yup — right on the Interstate, and from my window I can see semis, and even occasional trains rolling by. God bless America! (I know I do, though you may not.)
I just read that they used to round up outlaws in Arizona and give them a ticket to Deming — must have been a fun place.
Another great ride today, starting off this morning in the High Sierra pinewoods (with turtleneck, heated vest and grips on), then winding down through junipers and dramatic rock formations to the wide, lovely creosote desert, with distant mountains, occasional ranches, and a few areas of irrigated farmland (now when I see that, I can’t help wondering, “where is that water coming from, and who is it hurting?”). Amazing dust devils too, towering hundreds of feet high, sometimes four or five at a time. Then some long, straight stretches, to remind us why we love desert riding. (Yep, even some singin’.)
I passed a crow attacking a roadrunner, trying to steal its snake, and shortly after that I rode straight into a dense cloud of killer bees (I was told later), which hit me like a spatter of gravel and completely covered my helmet and the front of the motorcycle. I had to pull over and clean off my face shield to see the road. Yikes!
The Columbus, New Mexico, border crossing was a breeze, I’m glad to report (you never know, eh?), with only a brief wait to hand in my “Temporary Vehicle Import Permit” — the one I picked up way back when in Mexicali. Then I had to stop at the museum in Columbus (continuing the Pancho Villa theme, it’s the only place in the U.S. ever to be invaded by foreign “troops,” though apparently El Generalissimo himself didn’t attend, just incited his followers with, “Let’s go kill some gringos!”). Then up here, for another 700 kilometre [438 mile] day (seems to be the magic number lately). I poured myself a big ol’ glass of duty-free Glenmorangie (bought on the way down), and pulled out the Western U.S. map.
The question now, of course, is “now what?” Well, I called up the Rich family in Palm Desert, and arranged to get together with them, then called the good old Ingleside Inn (I had to use your name to get a room!). So I’ll stay in Palm Springs a couple of days, then maybe mosey into Hollywood and hang with Andrew and the rest of the expat gang there. Now that I can see ahead a little clearer, I could probably wind my way northward through the mountains and the Great Basin and make it up to visit the Lindley-Peart family in San Vancisco. That’s a sort-of plan, which has evolved over the past hour or two.
Otherwise, yeah, this was definitely the right thing for me to do now, and I’m glad I gave myself the necessary kick in the ass to get us back out and on the road again. I know you are too.
Once I get settled somewhere long enough (probably L.A.), I’ll give you a call and hope to speak to you. I did call from Mexico City on Thursday morning, hoping to hear from you that night or on Friday, but never did. I hope the court thing went okay. There’s a lot of stuff going on out here that needs you in it. Lots of chicks too, ditto.
Not that we care.
Big 10-4 from the Superslab westbound, good buddy, and the hammer is down Ghost Rider Redux
Just an escape artist
Racing against the night
A wandering hermit
Racing toward the light
GHOST RIDER, 2001
Chapter 12
SPRING FEVER
We can wear the rose of romance
An air of joie de vivre
Too tender hearts upon our sleeves
Or skin as thick as thieves
FORCE 10, 1987
“Springtime in the desert,” I thought, admiring the subtle transformations in the desert dreamscape as I left Deming and rode west on Interstate 10 across southern New Mexico and into Arizona. In such an exacting land, all life is normally conservative and even puritanical in its guarded displays, harboring every drop of moisture in its cells, while minimizing the surface it exposes to the arid heat. In the Sonora Desert, a brief rainy season passes through in the spring, and it only takes a couple of rainfalls to bring out the brief and urgent, yet still restrained, decorations of reproduction and germination.
The wispy palo verde trees carried an array of tiny yellow blossoms; the spindly arms of the ocotillo cactus were studded with vibrant red; a host of small plants and bushes displayed their subtle jewellery, and the mesquite, cholla, and giant saguaro cactus wore their full-dress greens. The wind blew fierce and steady from the west, raising dust clouds along the roadside, and it was a “quartering” wind against me and the motorcycle. Bad enough riding against a headwind that buffeted my helmet around and drove stubbornly back against the bike and my body, but trying to steer the bike into a wall of wind that was slightly off-center like that was even worse, combining the wind of my passage at 80 mph against the 40-mph wind vectoring in at me.
Stopping in Tucson for a maintenance check at the excellent BMW shop, I carried on westward on I-8, still fighting that vicious, punishing wind. By 4:00 I was ready to seek shelter for the night, and took the loop off the Interstate leading to the town of Gila Bend, Arizona — or what’s left of it.
Named for the Gila River (or what’s left of it), which meandered south from Phoenix, then turned west toward the mighty Colorado — or what’s left of it — only the town’s status as seat of Maricopa County seemed to hold off true “ghost town” designation, as waves of dust blew along the short main street, and freight trains rumbled by every few hours. Neither the wind nor the trains stopped at Gila Bend. A new police station and courthouse were the only prosperous-looking buildings, though the people of the town did seem to be resisting its decline. A few areas of the roadside had been landscaped in the natural style of “xeriscaping,” using the native plants in a decorative arrangement, but they had soon become covered with dust and litter. A recent attempt at a strip mall seemed to have failed, but the laundromat was apparently thriving, and the half-moribund main street offered a supermarket, video store, and a few motels and gas stations interspersed with a decrepit auto repair shop, a woodworking place (somewhat ironic, with no trees of any size for hundreds of miles), and an abandoned Llantera, or tire repair shop, a taste of Old Mexico.
Tall palms whipped in the wind above the local Best Western, called the “Space Age Lodge,” which was set apart from the usual run of motels by its theme: the lobby featured a mural of outer space, and the guest rooms were decorated with framed photographs of the Space Shuttle. The restaurant was called “Outer Limits,” but had been destroyed in a fire recently and was under reconstruction. This was one of the times I wished I were a more sociable reporter; I would have liked to interview the person whose vision this was, but I was content just to experience it — and send Brutus and my grandfather a postcard from there.
The gravel bed of the Gila River was dry, even after the recent rains, for its flow was channeled into a concrete canal, which was full. The girl behind the front desk at the Space Age Lodge told me the water was “foul” bec
ause of Phoenix, and you weren’t even allowed to fish in it. And far from acting as the “flood control” the builders of such projects always tout to justify their short-term profiteering, one year that canal had overflowed and washed the few irrigated fields completely away.
A more dramatic example of such high-handed fumbling dominated my next day’s ride, as I rode around the shore of the so-called Salton Sea. This depression in the earth’s surface had formerly been called the Salton Sink, until the Colorado overflowed its artificial banks in 1905 and flooded the whole area. Too salty for drinking or irrigation, the new inland sea soon became a “sink” of another kind, contaminated with agricultural runoff from the irrigated Imperial Valley to the south and the date palms, orchards, and vegetable farms of the Coachella Valley to the north, until it became known as the “Salton Sewer.”
29 Apr Gila Bend — Palm Springs CA 106,786 (486 kms) [303 miles]
Awake at 4:00 a.m. (bad), cool and less windy (good), free continental breakfast (bad), nice ride across I-8 to Imperial Valley, then up along Salton Sea (smelly).
On a cool, overcast morning I took a detour to explore the ragged remains of Salton City, once planned to be among several resort and retirement communities on the shore of the Sea, which would have offered a desert climate and superb scenery of the surrounding mountains — had they not been sited on a cesspool. Then west into the Borrego Mountains, north on the high plateau connecting to the San Jacinto Mountains, and back down again to the Coachella Valley and the resort and retirement community of Palm Springs. This true oasis, in one of the hottest regions of the desert, was facing its own decline into urban pollution. It was in danger of becoming a miniature Phoenix (alas!), with its own spreading suburbs of Cathedral City, Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, La Quinta, Indian Wells, and all the way to Indio.
After riding down the steep highway into the “greater Palm Springs area,” I stopped and phoned Cathy Rich for directions to their home in Rancho Mirage. Greeted by an artificial waterfall at the entrance, I was cleared into the gated community by a security guard, then rode through the manicured streets between high walls and the low, tile-roofed condominiums built around the shores of two artificial lakes. So much water, the symbol of wealth in the desert, but no doubt it was psychologically soothing in the blistering summer, when the thermometer might hit 120° Fahrenheit for days on end. I remembered talking to Cathy on the phone once on such a day, when she had said, “I am living . . . in hell.”
Nowhere is perfect, of course, and the Palm Springs area was certainly beautiful in its way, an expanse of green palm trees and golf courses set against the steep rise of the San Jacinto Mountains to the west and facing across the valley to the Indio Hills and the Little San Bernardino Mountains, brown and gold under the sun that always seemed to be shining there. Or nearly always — the Ghost Rider managed to bring rain to this desert too, and over the three days I spent there, light showers began to fall from an uncharacteristically gray sky. Rain in the desert had an effect different from the unwelcome gloom it often brought to other climes, for the attenuated light dimmed the usual unrelenting glare of the sun and brought a lighter kind of melancholy, illuminated by the knowledge that this rain was rare and life-giving.
Once again, it was like exhaling a long-held breath to park my bike for a few days, this time at the Ingleside Inn, where Brutus and I had stayed during rehearsals after the mid-tour break on the Test For Echo tour, in the spring of 1997. The cozy little rooms and cabañas set in lush gardens on a back street of Palm Springs were an oasis of another kind for my little baby soul, as rabbits hopped about the lawns, mockingbirds and doves called, and hummingbirds darted among the flowers. The steep mountainside rose almost at the back gate, where I saw a roadrunner and a family of quail among the cactus of an “xeriscaped” garden, and that night, I heard coyotes yipping at the full moon.
And once again during my visits to the Rich family I sank into the peaceful ease of being in someone’s home. Cathy and Steve and I shared the dumb jokes that had sustained us during the frantic and exciting weeks of recording the tribute album in Manhattan, and I bonded with Nick, now 15, in the same way I had when we had first met, when he was nine and we were both performing at a Buddy Rich Memorial Scholarship concert in New York. Two hours before show time, I had been tapping nervously on the practice pad on my lap, and Nick had appeared at my dressing room door, wide-eyed and frantic, and said, “I am so nervous — can I hang around with you?” I had said, “I’m nervous too, come on in,” and we kept each other company until showtime. A few weeks later, Cathy told me that when she got home one day and told Nick that she’d had a letter from me, he looked up from the ditch where he was catching frogs and said, “I love Neil — can he come and live with us?” Aw, shucks.
I had felt the same way about him, and now I found he was helping to fill a void in my life, a smart, sassy kid to roughhouse with and tease the way I used to do with Selena. There was still an immature teenager in me, I discovered, and being around a great kid like Nick was both a torment and a comfort. Together we visited the outdoor zoo and gardens of The Living Desert, where the day’s light rain brought out the elusive animals like cheetah and mountain lion from their shady retreats, and we hiked a little on the mountain trails, talking and joking comfortably together. It was good for my soul.
After three days, I went back to Los Angeles for what I hoped might be another entertaining visit. Once again, Andrew was determined to get me “out of myself,” and took me on a hike in Topanga State Park, above the wide blue Pacific at the end of Sunset Boulevard, accompanied by his Jack Russell terrier, Bob. On the way back, Andrew grabbed my arm and pointed to a rattlesnake across the trail just ahead of us, and as we froze we saw that Bob was somehow on the other side of it. Afraid Bob might be tempted to “play” with the snake, I told Andrew to concentrate on keeping him away while I stamped on the ground and threw stones until it finally slithered off into the chaparral.
Andrew also kept my social calendar filled with nights out with the Canadian ex-patriate gang, Matt Stone (an “honorary Canadian,” we decided, as he was from Colorado), and Andrew’s room-mate, Wil, an intelligent, articulate young urbanite from San Francisco. We all had some long dinners and kitchen-table forums back at Dave Foley’s house (though Dave himself was out of town at the time, several of the other guys were staying at his “Canuck drop-in center”). And then there was Gabrielle, the girl Dave had been dating during my last visit. Andrew told me they weren’t dating anymore, and her attitude toward me seemed very warm.
My Air of Tragedy was striking again, apparently, and one night when Andrew and I were about to leave a party at Dave’s house a little after midnight (Andrew had an early photo shoot), Gabrielle stood in front of me and said, “You don’t have to go.” She looked straight into my eyes with a telepathic ray, it seemed, and I was totally galvanized for a few seconds. Shaken (and stirred), I mumbled something about “saving Andrew from himself,” and left with him (saving myself from myself, more like).
The next afternoon, I was out walking around Hollywood on some errands, to the post office, the bank, and the excellent bookstore on Sunset Boulevard, Book Soup. On the way back I thought about Gabrielle’s invitation to stop by the restaurant where she worked (while waiting for acting calls, like many young people in Hollywood). Working as a hostess in the main restaurant, she was too busy to talk much, but gave me a big smile and a hug as I took a seat at the bar. I ordered a bowl of pea soup, a Coke, and an espresso (obviously in need of caffeine, after all those long nights), looked over my purchases (Nelson Algren, Joseph Conrad, T.C. Boyle, Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, and Great Plains by Ian Frazier) and caught up on my journal writing. “Could be fun here, if it wouldn’t kill me . . .”
Truman Capote once wrote that he believed that anybody who loved somebody else and pursued them ardently enough would eventually get them, for no one can resist being loved that much. I think there’s truth in that, and to a lesser degree, I was
finding it hard to resist someone (well, an attractive woman) who was apparently interested in me. Or maybe my little baby soul had decided it was time to respond to the idea. In my journal I tried to be the voice of reason, “Slight attack of ‘girl fever.’ Keep telling myself no, no, no. Hope I listen! Nothing but trouble there.”
But it was no good.
That night, a bunch of us met at Club Largo for an excellent performance by Aimee Mann (who had sung on the Rush song, “Time Stand Still,” back in 1987) and her husband, Michael Penn. Afterwards we went from bar to bar, led by the irrepressible Gabrielle. On the way home in a cab, there were four of us crammed into the back seat, so that I was helplessly pressed against — her. A fumbling goodnight kiss, half friendly-on-the-cheek, half lipsward, and she murmurs, “Don’t leave town without talking to me,” carrying a freight of meanings to my tormented brain.
I said I wouldn’t, but I did. Having not only told everyone, but pretty much decided to stay another day, the next morning, with a crushing hangover, found me throwing my bags together, loading the bike, and getting the hell out of Dodge.
Unable to deal with that confusing upwelling of feelings I was not ready to face, or even acknowledge, feelings I had thought were dead (maybe forever), I decided to get away from there for awhile, try to think this through “like a sensible person.”
So, I rode across the Hollywood Hills to the San Fernando Valley and stopped in Encino to visit Freddie Gruber — a man who definitely deserves some introduction. Freddie was a native New Yorker who as a young man had been a drum prodigy in the jazz world of the late ’40s, but fled that self-destructive scene and worked his way west through Chicago, Las Vegas, eventually settling in Los Angeles to play the after-hours clubs, and develop a whole new career as a master teacher. He had been Buddy Rich’s best friend until Buddy’s death in 1987 (so often I would hear Freddie say, “I still miss him, man”), and remained close with many of the prominent musicians of his day, as well as many of his students, who had become the prominent musicians of this day. Their names may not be well known to the average listener, but their playing would be heard on the radio every day.