The return journey from the California coast was planned to include some of the Mother Road, Route 66, in California and Arizona, though not from the beginning of the historic highway at Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles. I’m seriously averse to big city driving and seriously bad at navigation of the same. One of the first of the US numbered highways to span the continental USA and opened in November 1926, Route 66 ran from Chicago to Los Angeles.
Much of my Californian Route 66 experience this time around was the Mohave desert piece. It was unbelievably, scary hot: July isn’t the best time to visit the Mohave desert. The light is harsh and hard. It was too hot to feel like stopping much to explore and perhaps I had been on the road a bit long now. The magnet of home (whatever that is) was kicking in, pulling inexorably.
I’m using pictures for this section from a little Route 66 reconnaissance trip to Newberry Springs, California, which I did on a rainy day in February this year.
Today it seems much of the old road has disappeared. It was officially removed from the US Highway system in 1985, replaced by the interstate system. It is harder to delete the romance of the road, it's metaphors and imagery from popular culture. Buildings and engineering structures crumble. The imagination reinvigorates such that ideas live on.
In February my goal had been to find Bagdad Cafe, the setting for the 1987 Percy Adlon movie with the theme song which still haunts.*
Many of the set pieces so familiar from the movie were still around, but Bagdad Cafe was a seriously sad experience smelling strongly of cat piss and neglect. Another place of ghosts and out-of-oxygen dreams. Is there a theme here? Are my USA popular culture references just so dated now?
Who even knows a European (albeit English language) movie from the late eighties anymore?
I certainly couldn’t get the sandwich I was hoping for at the onetime cafe and occasional music venue,( internet lied again) now just a run-down roadside attraction, where a dirty old coffee flask and dvd (who watches dvds anymore?)share space on the dusty counter with random tools and other detritus of a resource starved life.
I could have dulled (or enhanced depending on your point of view) the experience by sharing the pungent home rolled cigarette offered me by a disheveled individual who erupted with hacking coughs from an equally disheveled van parked out front. Though I refused, the vision was apparently strong. Some bemused British (in a softop Mustang) and hoards of Japanese (in a white van) tourists instantly raised phones, snapping pictures and video of the interaction. When I remonstrated, they told me they thought I was part of the roadside attraction “You fit right in” in plummy British tones.
“You do. You do. Oh please stay”. The van dweller coughed and spluttered some more, smudging us all in that smelly smoke before taking another deep pull on his now spluttering and sparking home rolled and collapsing back onto an old guitar on the bed in his van.
I was ready to leave this run down, over stickered graveyard of a once was marvelous movie set. I asked that all pictures of me be deleted from devices, (yeah good luck with that) tossed my jata, symbol of the sadvhni (female sadhu) or sanyasi which I am now free to wear, and left.
As an aside: Please please people stop sticking plastic stickers on every surface. It’s a recent graffiti trend which I find anti-aesthetic in extreme. To me it is puerile and clutters an environment with a visual version of poop, a plastic human excrement, as the front of Baghdad Cafe testifies.
The authentic siren song of the desert road still calls me, hard though it might be to hear at times in this plastic world. …coming closer, sweet release…
*I am calling you Bob Telson 1987
A desert road from vegas to nowhere
some place better than where you're been
A coffee machine that needs some fixing
In a little cafe just around the bend
I am calling you
Can't you hear me
I am calling you
A hot dry wind blows right through me
The baby's crying and I can't sleep
But we both know a change is coming
coming closer, sweet release
I am calling you
I know you hear me
I am calling you
I am calling you
I know you hear me
I am calling you
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