Desert rats

Something about the desert, the isolation from nearly everyone with whom I'm accustomed to having regular discourse, the absence of any excuse to fix my hair... I have found myself restless for meaningful engagement and a reason to plug in the curling iron. Maybe not in that order, you say? 

There are no electrical outlets in our tiny casita's baño, which should not come as a surprise if you've paying any attention at all. Also the mirror, which is not even close to being over the bathroom sink, is placed at a height appropriate for a ten-year-old. 

First mirror selfie of the trip. Headless, and not a trick of perspective. If nothing else, this trip is teaching me lessons in 1) resourcefulness and 2) determination. I will not be that lady who went nutto, moved to the desert with a wild man to do arts and crafts, and let herself go. I currently have a hot curling iron, a can of AquaNet, and a severe lack of input from you all, which could be misconstrued by some as a lack of better judgement. 

In these days of not being on the move and not being overloaded with the constant new stimuli of the road, a restlessness creeps in, akin to the restlessness of sitting in a cubicle and wanting something deeper, more meaningful, a model for learning and sharing. Ben and I have these talks at night about the origins of these feelings and cravings and how to build a model to address them. These stretches of stillness change the trip from one of external discovery to one one of internal discovery. It may or may not be of any interest out there, but if you are out there reading, this may be an S.O.S of sorts. 

Ben works on Billy and says we know we can't figure things out just by thinking about them. We can't find where we are going without getting up and going there. Whatever conversation I'm looking for, whatever healthy, meaningful, fulfilling engagement model I'm seeking, probably won't happen through a blog. Who knows how this will all play out, but while the face to face conversation with the outside world is missing, thanks for the occasional emails and texts and for generally keeping in touch. For now, digital contact is a sort of social life line as we move away from the center of the village and hurl ourselves at a wilderness I've not fully explored before. We are our own social experiment and this blog is the admittedly unwise record of the inner workings of a deranged mind disguised by freshly big and fabulous hair.

 

Half Asian, half hippie

A grand, domestic adventure, then...

I just made grain-free, crunchy granola in a wok (oh, yes... a wok) and there is a hand-knitted wool hobo bag felting itself in the washing machine (that crazy sweater is done. Hooray!). Help yourself to the contact form on the right if you feel this whole experiment is getting out of control. Before you get too judgy, though, you should know that the granola is scrumptious. Dried coconut flakes, almond slices, hemp seeds, pumpkin pie spices, and coconut sugar tossed and toasted to crispy, not-too-sweet perfection and stirred into maple yogurt from pastured cows. We got dried mulberries in the co-op's bulk section, but then we walked around downtown to check out a funny gathering of VW buses and some real hippies playing hand drums and we ate almost all the dried berries by the handful like they were popcorn at a movie. They were better in our mouths than in granola... I think. 

The dog next door has quit barking for a moment and we have sheets with no holes, a gas stove (I LOVE gas stoves!), a half bottle of cab, and a sky lit up with positively exuberant stars. This may be the first time in my adult life that I am not particularly anxious for a new year to start. This year is so lovely and ridiculous.

Speaking of lovely and ridiculous: Christy, if you're reading this, check your mail next week. (To clarify, you are the lovely. The sweater is the ridiculous.)

 

This is why we can't have nice things

After a perfectly relaxing Christmas in which the only split second of drama and disappointment came when we realized we had, in fact, eaten the very last salt caramel truffle in the sea salt caramel talenti gelato, and a breakfast this morning of shagging followed by fried plantains fried in bacon grease, refried beans (leftovers that I re-refried in bacon grease), and local eggs scrambled (and yes, fried) with fried bacon and roasted poblanos from the farmers market, we headed out to run a few errands. Our mood was gay and light. This is the third sentence in this paragraph--I'm trying to remember to breathe. 

I wanted double pointed knitting needles, fruity deodorant, rubber gloves, slippers, baby wipes, plasti-dip (google it--it's incredible), and bed sheets... because there are holes in the sheets at our current tiny furnished casita where the neighbor's dog has not stopped barking for two days and which Ben suspects might also sometimes function as a halfway house. I will actively seek out a fairly high level of funk in search of adventure, but we are two miles from downtown Tucson, not camping in the bush of some developing country. Even if I do love a burlap washcloth, I strongly prefer intact linens during the domestic leg of this journey. Acquiring this short list of truly necessary items naturally required trips to four or five separate stores. 

This is my first product shot. Try to be nice. Ben is making me post my own photos as a not very sneaky form of encouragement.

The craft store was horrific, as expected. I spend far too much time in crafty stores to talk trash about the other freaks who frequent them, but those people are freaks. You know who you are. The Home Depot was dreamy, as usual--no drama. Then we went to the Rack and Target, back to back. We almost didn't make it to Target because I had a breakdown at the Rack after trying on a pair of True Religion skinny jeans and a pair of Crocs (yes, together. And no, I am still not buying clothes.) Then Target was this traumatic psychic and sensory assault of fluorescent lights, plastic products off-gassing into stale air, small children wailing over the candy they could not have for at least another five minutes until they wore down their parents' weak resolve, and couples bickering over the difference between a sweater and a sweater dress. Okay, one couple, but it was illustrative of the other couples bickering over other inane topics. 

Though at times needful, middle-class American shopping today was very much not a rich and beautiful experience. It reminded me of the lives we left behind and the perpetual acquisition of cheap, shiny, new crap. We have a giant storage space full of once shiny, once new crap that we don't really care a whit for. Aside from Ben's tools, my sewing machine, some kitchen wares, and few pairs of hip-loving jeans that I can actually pull over my own calves, there is almost nothing worth replacing. Being surrounded by everything we are supposed to want in order in be normal only made us grumpy and tired. Normal fits a lot of people--most everyone, really--but it's like skinny jeans on me; I can't quite squeeze myself into it without feeling and looking silly and uncomfortable. I'm finding more and more that quirky, old, handmade, and downright funky suit me better. I'm knitting a pair of funny wool slippers now. 

Thank you, shopping in America, for reminding me to make a wild and beautiful existence instead of a normal life, to be rich instead of having everything. 

The normal doesn't really live anywhere

In keeping with the theme of letting go, my blogger iPhone app just crashed before I saved the last two days worth of adventures and observations. Looking back, it was likely no great loss. We had a lovely time in our fancy neighborhood, sipping wine, watching sunsets from viewpoint walls on mountain tops, sleeping in million thread-count sheets, etc. 

Today, Christmas Eve, we moved into our new barrio pequeño, a little gated compound of six tiny casitas (read potentially adorable free-standing studio apartments) where for the next week Ben can work on Billy without sidelong glances from fancy neighbors. 

Our landlady du jour filled us in on our barrio-mates, telling us that one does tarot readings and another looks "scary like a gangster thug, but is really very nice." When we gave her our Seattle PO Box as a mailing address, she assumed that we were homeless (which we are, but still...). The thing that keeps it on the charming side of bizarre is that our barrio pequeño is not actually a trailer park. That is not to say we are above finding our little vintage camper and parking it here while we fix it up real purty. (As I write this, two cats are fighting in the... uh... courtyard.)

When we arrived at our new digs Ben announced, "This is where we will live for the next week like migrant workers! Not because we have to, but because we can!" I nearly died of hysterical laughter. Billy feels remarkably at home here and didn't get the joke at all. He'll watch a sunset from anywhere, sleep under the stars--which here are so bright as to remind you that in their own worlds they are suns and unlike anything I've ever seen in a real-life sky--and he couldn't care a single bit less who's around. Billy is just good people. 

I'll never have to look up "sanguine" again

Every sunset is more upsetting than the last. I mean that in the most happy, heart-bursting way. Ben let me appropriate his phone to take pictures of tonight's. I am sorry for my future self that I can't even begin to capture with a phone the desert smell--he tells me the creosote trees are what make it smell like fresh rain--or the crimson laying itself all over the horizon. Sanguine. Everything about this is supremely sanguine. We saw a wild pig cross the road and ramble into the desert. 

Today we moved from our convenient-yes, and-boring downtown motel into a charming little casita in the Catalina foothills. The woman who owns it, Irene, has made it into a tasteful and romantic getaway guest house and rents it out for pocket change. We will be here for three nights and will then be homeless again on Christmas Eve. This neighborhood is affluent and white and ostentatiously in love with Christmas and has collectively decided to invite Santa Claus to town while simultaneously fucking everyone in their eyes with a hundred million lightbulbs. Irene lives in the main house and seems to like the desert well enough to let it be its beautiful self. For this and other reasons, I like Irene. She was in the Air Force for 28 years. She left a bowl of blackberries and pineapple and a bottle of wine in our room. Everything is perfect and we are in the middle of a nice, white neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. I am wary that we are the expendable characters at the beginning of a Dexter episode. I accidentally bathed myself in "letting go" perfume this morning and perhaps this gray-spirited ingrate who lives inside me will be gone before my next encounter with a horse. Meanwhile, I am having a glorious time of it, I swear. 

Just before we moved, we went to the farmers market at Rillito Park. Incredible produce, adorable, wide-eyed, healthful girls baking gluten-free everything (I got greedy and we ate a chocolate cupcake in the truck on the way to the other market down the road, but after I sat on a big fat crumb and it looked like I pooped my pants, we (I) decided to skip market no. 2 and go wash my trousers), and this guy roasting poblano chiles and jalapeños and other peppers in a giant, rotating, mesh drum with four blowtorches hooked up to throw flame as he cranks the handle that spins the drum like a spit. Brilliant. And fresh eggs. And chorizo from the very man who raised the pig. 

And choi and some cousin of scallion with ridiculous onion powers to make me cry, which I realize doesn't take much... just a simple, fleeting, blood-red December sunset in a desert that smells like city rain in summertime, far from a home that no longer exists, with a man who sees into my soul like horses do, and shows me the world like I've always imagined but have never seen. 

Boneyard sunset

We arrived in Tucson on Wednesday. It was raining and bleak and not desert-like in the least. Ben wintered here once many years ago and felt healthy and at peace. He felt drawn back here to see if he had perhaps romanticized this place, and driving in from the west, I was certain he absolutely had done so. 

In the dark and miserable rain I saw none of the beauty he had described, and also I was riding the crest of a hormonal freak out, the last one of which happened roughly 28 days ago. All I felt was the weight of a past to which I did not belong, and cold and wet and generally unreasonable in every way, as can sometimes happen about once every month. 

We checked into our hotel and I immediately fell asleep and stayed soundly so for nearly two hours. I woke up refreshed and slightly more reasonable and we walked the short mile to the local co-op for fresh vegetables and so that I could poke and sniff around the organic, vegan, wildcrafted, handmade-by-benevolent-witches health and beauty potions, many of which have magical healing properties, some of which I actually understand, like anything lavender-scented. 

There is a local woman named Kate who crafts tiny bottles of anointing oils, or perfumes with intention. I happen to love both perfume and intention, and so I went to work appreciating hers. I was drawn to two of the eight or so flavors, "letting go" and "fearlessness and confidence," and only "letting go" smelled right to me with its rose and cedarwood base. I dipped generously into to the tester bottle and anointed the buhjeezus out my wrists like some furtive grocery store priestess. 

We ate a simple dinner of miso soup loaded with baby bok choy, fresh shiitakes, garlic, ginger, and scallions and a second course of refried beans and corn and prickly pear cactus tortillas hand-made by Anita, another local woman who sells her goods to the co-op. Afterward, I pressed my wrists to my face and inhaled deeply and fell asleep again. That night I dreamed the most beautiful dreams of being utterly free in ways I have not been in perhaps ever. 

Yesterday the sun had come out again and normal life for us resumed, which is to say the world was once again full of wonder. Ben indulged me in a trip to hoard more yarn (idle hands, etc.) and then took me west to the mountains to watch the sunset. It hadn't occurred to me that, since leaving the coast and driving east, we had not seen a single sunset. 

We barely caught the last of the breathtaking light as the mountains turned to silhouettes and the city lights in the valley below became a twinkling sea. Scrambling up the dry, white, bone-like rocks of the trail made it real to me that we are, in fact, in the desert. We talked about the crawling pace of the desert and how time moves so slowly here as to seem to stand still. The rush of the coastal cities, the pounding of water and its constant change, doesn't exist in this place. Here it is so still and ancient that it appears dead to someone like me, someone unfamiliar, raised and living always near the sea. 

Ben told me that we would come back in the daytime to listen and watch. He says that the boneyard surface of the desert belies the resilience of life here, that everything that lives here has adapted over countless lifetimes to survive, and we will see and hear it moving, hot and low to the ground. Everything here feels ancient. I feel ancient here. It is as though, like everything else that survived by adapting when the oceans abandoned this place an ice age ago or more, I will toughen and cure and learn to change colors and shed old skins and seek heat and carry only what I really need and let go of the rest. 

The normal doesn't live here

We are in the Arizona desert looking for weird, and it seems to have been here waiting for us. People live in compounds and circle their campers like covered wagons inside chain link fences out in the desert plain. An ancient Indian man was walking down the middle of the highway with what appeared to be everything he owns, with not a town for fifty miles in either direction, and not looking the least bit distressed by his situation. It occurs to me that we are in a similar situation, but in a truck, which changes things somewhat. We tried to stay at the cleanest (according to yelp), kookiest motel in Gila Bend, but in the forty minutes between calling them and showing up there, someone else had taken the last room. Apparently that particular motel had not, in fact, been waiting for us and the other motel was more icky than kooky, so we made tracks for the Best Western up the road, as we sometimes like to do when normal seems okay enough. Thank you, desert, for being so far out in the middle of nowhere that the rules don't matter anymore.

Postcards from Billy (Pile of Rocks National Park, AZ)

Oh, yeah. We drove through Joshua Tree National Park, which Ben has renamed for purposes of accurate representation.

Ben: This is a lot of piles of rocks. Do you think it gets different?

Thank you notes along the trail of tears... of hysterical laughter

Our next destination may or may not be Tucson, AZ. We may or may not be getting ideas of hunkering down for the winter somewhere in the desert. We are definitely looking for that funky vintage camper trailer in earnest now. I can't stop knitting a really hilarious sweater that makes me think of swimming pools. I don't quite know what these things have to do with each other, but it feels as though it is all coming together as it should.

Ben plotted our route east through California and inadvertently took us through a series of towns of varying significance in my childhood. First Wasco, where I lived partial summers with my Dad's parents, a gentle and jovial Baptist preacher and his twinkly-eyed, self-righteous, Dutch and Potowatami Indian, Oklahoma farm-bred wife who grew and canned her own vegetables and walked me to and left me to turn brown at the community swimming pool across the street from their trailer park every day except Sunday, when we went to church to hear my grand-daddy preach. It nearly shocked the devil's own hell right out of every last Christian one of my Dad's six preacher and missionary siblings when, years after his death, research into family ancestry turned up evidence that grand-daddy Greenwalt was ethnically Jewish. Thank you, Internet. I'm still laughing about it. This shit is so rich. 

We stayed that night, Monday, in Tehachapi. Tehachapi is a really charming, western, high desert town, small enough to hear a train come through every 15 minutes regardless of where in town you happen to be. Mostly we were inside our room at the Ranch Hotel Motel, not to be confused with the Ranch House Motel a stone's throw up the road. This was undoubtedly the coldest place I have ever slept indoors. We might have been warmer had we used our blankets to seal the two-inch opening under one corner of our door. 

Ben: (Shivering) It's freezing in here. Do you feel this draft? 

James: (Teeth chattering) Y-y-y-yes! There is light coming in under the door. A lot of it. It was so cold last night I literally died. 

Ben and James together: Shrieks of hysterical laughter

Entering town, I missed some of the charm because it was getting dark and I was freaking out that this was the town where my dad had killed a man when I was eleven. I don't know that I would have believed it but for his decades-long disappearance to Mexico and subsequent trial and conviction in my adulthood. I had no idea we would be passing through Tehachapi and we certainly had no plans to spend the night, but the whole thing was too surreal not to, and so we did. No revelations came out this night of huddling together like skinny dogs to preserve body heat; we simply woke in a sunny, charming western town, refreshed and happy to get back in Billy, whose heater works like an absolute dream. Thanks, Billy, for taking us away from here.

Tuesday night we ate Mexican food and drank a margarita in Twentynine Palms. My Dad's most corpulent and sanctimonious brother and his well-matched wife shepherded one of Jesus's flocks here in the eighties. I visited as a kid and played monopoly and watched the original Footloose with Kevin Bacon as the dancing high school hero and Kenny Loggins as the behind-the-scenes magic maker. Bacon seemed really old to me then. Not so much now. I grew up under some ferocious Baptist doctrine and was able to shake it off early (otherwise I might have been a virgin until I was 38), but just recently started dancing out loud in public, like at the grocery store or anywhere else a pop song is playing. It's so fun. Despite being an amateur, I am pretty sure I have the moves like Jagger. After dinner we slept in a kooky roadside motel on a hill overlooking the desert, with brightly painted cabin-like rooms--lime green, pepto pink, lemon yellow, littlegirl lavender. It was horrific and wonderful at the same time. Also, a small space heater in our room radiated pure love and I loved it right back. The innkeeper/owner was a sweet, laid back man from India who was so tickled when I interrupted his phone call and asked him if I could buy one of his washcloths (what? they are that good kind of scratchy that makes for remarkable exfoliation) that he gave me a small stack of them like weird souvenirs. That's right, he just gave them to me. I guess he figured I could have simply stolen his bleached burlap bath linens and so deserved a small reward for not being a sneaky jerk. Thanks, mister. Now we are both tickled.

There is no seafood at the Monterey Bay Aquarium cafe

We stayed in Marina for another night after my cows-by-the-sea homecoming queen act so that we could go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which opened when I was in grade school, so I grew up going there on countless school field trips with a bunch of kids who all wanted to be marine biologists before getting knocked up or shot by 11th grade. Almost everything from childhood seems smaller when you see it again as an adult--this awe-inspiring aquarium doesn't. It is as breathtaking as any display of wildlife in captivity I can imagine, and there is a lot of wildlife in my imagination. I took this picture of a cute sea anemone and his homely little sidekick buddy. Ben took sexy jellyfish pictures and turned a school of sardines into supermodels. What a show-off.

We ate artichokes, arguably the world's best cioppino, and a little bit of everything else at Phil's Seafood in Moss Landing. The sit-outside heaters were on high and the luckiest cat in the universe was on duty. It was all so good we forgot to take a picture until we had eaten almost everything on the table. I'm not sorry.

Postcards from Billy (Marina, CA)

We've taken to staying in kitschy, funny motels when they are uber-clean and have a good bit of character and charm, and also are not sketchy and frightening. I wish we had photos of the Lamplighter and the Ester Lee and the Westport Lodge; those were gems. Most of these old motels still use metal keys! Back when time mattered I wore an analog wristwatch, so you can imagine my delight at metal keys. And Billy, well he just looks downright cozy at the Old Marina Inn. Why, he's all metal himself.

This is your porn star name? (A memoir)

You can probably steal my identity once I disclose this perfectly trivial information, but we're driving around throwing caution to the wind, so here goes. You take your childhood pet's name and the name of the street where you grew up, and voila! My porn star name is Tippy Cardoza (super hot, right?), and here is a picture of Ben taking pictures of the sky over the ocean beyond an artichoke field just before the exit off Highway 1 that takes you to the street where I grew up. 

As a child, I had no idea I was one exit away from being raised as a true country mouse. I also didn't grasp that John Steinbeck was anything more than a local literary hero who graced our bookcases at home, or that kids at other high schools in other states read Of Mice and Men. It only made sense because my dad was a lit major who liked the manly writers like Bukowski and Hemingway and Kerouac. We had also lived in Salinas for a year before moving down the road to Marina. Like my father, I am in spirit if not in fact, a Steinbeck country native. I did not understand this until now.

I'm stalling on the important stuff because I'm already uncomfortable about returning to the scene of my wicked youth, which is also the town where my mom died a handful of years ago. Someone else's pancreatic cancer is usually brutal and quick enough that you can't really emotionally prepare for what's coming other than to be properly terrified, but is mercifully slow enough for you to show up and get in the way as much as you can, but especially right at the very end to be present and sweet and dutiful and all the other filial good things you failed to be for the first three and half decades of your life, by which I naturally mean my life. 

I nearly changed my mind about coming back because nothing required my attention and it seemed like a waste to drive back to the coast and then east again, but Ben wanted me to experience this place differently, not only now as an adult, but without obligation for the first time in possibly ever. The relief of it hit me about twenty miles away when we turned onto 156 and drove through the eucalyptus groves, where I started sobbing as though my heart had just broken for the first time. Billy's windows were down and I wanted to smell the eucalyptus, but I was all snotty, so I had to mostly remember the scent and try to catch a whiff between nose blows. 

I had all but forgotten that the street up on which I grew (how's that for grammatical douche-baggery?), which was the main road in our tiny cul de sac neighborhood, was a dead end street with a giant pasture at the far end, perhaps a scant mile away (I'm being generous) from my house. I used to roller skate to the edge of my little world and chit chat with the cows. At some point, probably around the same age it stopped being cool to memorize Shel Silverstein poems (as if that's even possible), I stopped visiting them, and more housing developments sprung up, along with motels, a gas station, big ugly stores. I guess I assumed that in the decades since I had last  skated to the end of the street, the pasture and the cows had been swallowed up by humans living their consumer lives. 

We turned onto Cardoza Avenue and drove on past the old house, the old neighbors, the old obligations and expectations and all the old guilt and everything else I've held onto without knowing it and we made a bee line for the end of the street. And there they were just where I had left them thirty years ago, my innocent, sloe-eyed, quiet old friends in the field I had forgotten. 

There is something in coming back here and feeling the past fold in on itself only to open again and offer a glimpse into that which only seemed possible in books I read as a child. This is Steinbeck country. This is where the sidewalk ends. 

Pictures of Ben taking pictures of chickens

...except that I completely missed the chickens. On the way from Madera to the Monterey Bay, we stopped at this roadside fruit shack in the middle of a giant pasture with a picnic area, a flashy cock, and countless flavors of pistachios and four pounds of oranges for a single dollar. We discovered that pistachios don't really require any additional flavoring, because it just masks the natural pistachio deliciousness and gets all over your fingers, which is probably fine if Purell is not your primary daytime mode of manual hygiene, as can be the case on the road. Also, our four pounds of tiny, discount oranges are nearly impossible to peel, and despite our extensive travel kitchen, which now includes a first aid kit after last night's broccoli incident, we have no citrus juicer. But Ben took this picture that actually has the chickens in it:

Ben gets wild mushrooms to work the camera like hot models

Postcards from Billy (Madera, CA)

This morning we left Madera, CA. Some news special a few years back called this place "The Land that Time Forgot." Our friend Patrick said it's because nobody ever leaves. Ever. I've only met a handful of people from here, and they were here when we arrived yesterday and are still here as we drive away, so I supposed I can't argue with that reasoning with any real authority. I find them to be wonderful folks, especially Patrick's family, who are warm and kind-hearted and the kind of people you would trust with your own kids. Patrick's depiction of the town is generations upon generations of deeply interwoven and probably mostly blood-related community living like it's the Wild West. When we went out to dinner, he made it sound like the most dangerous town in the country, which seemed a bit dramatic, but added a touch of excitement to the evening. Ben and I had a whiskey flight to keep in the spirit of things.

California is in a fierce water crisis. I took an army shower in our "fancy" hotel that looked like a spa and had yummy shower amenities and an elaborate breakfast, turning off the water while I shampooed my hair and soaped my shivering body. It was invigorating. I felt like a major bad-ass. Then when I rinsed off, the water was sooooo deliciously warm that I stayed in for a few extra minutes. In the end, I don't think I saved any water, but it's raining now and I kind of didn't shower again yesterday. Also, I have no kids, so I am ahead by about a hundred million eco-points, which means I won a steak dinner last night and today we bought plastic bottles of smartwater with absolutely no idea where the nearest recycle bin will be once we slake this wicked thirst. On the other hand, we haven't printed a single useless document in a corporate office for nearly three weeks. Still winning!

James's quote of the day (Crazy Eye)

Ben has been taking all these photos of me. I've never liked pictures of myself, because I always look weird(er than in real life). Every time he points the camera at me, I get all deer-in-the-headlights and the photo ends up even goofier, so he's been taking candid shots, like this one, where I am very serious, lying down and typing with my shoulders resting neatly all up inside my own ears like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. 

Then there is this one, where I am laughing about busting Ben taking my picture in stealth mode. At this point we are absolutely shrieking with laughter. "I LOVE that picture of me! Do you think you can PhotoShop that crazy eyeball into the right place?"

Mostly writing in hotel rooms feels like this. I think he nailed it.

BAM! (We heart Nugget) + Ben's quote of the day

Ben's quote of the day: "This is incredible. We win, muthafuckas!"

And so nothing much to report in the past couple of days except a wee little bit o'laundry last night (what a colossal waste of time! I could have been knitting the new sweater I just started. The one I've been wearing for 11 days is about to hitchhike back to Seattle alone) in Sonora, CA, where we just barely escaped a big, fat, fake-ass mining town experience by the skin of our teeth. I have recently--that is to say in the past 24 hours, give or take--discovered that Ben has an intense aversion to 1800s mining town replicas. No photos were taken. Billy was not impressed, either.

The Judge has decreed that a Best Western is at least honest about what it is, and so that is where we stayed, instead of in some hokey, imitation gold rush saloon. The night before that was the Best Western in Woodland, CA, near the Nugget grocery store, where my admittedly limited culinary world was once again rocked. 

Thank you, Nugget, for carrying grass-fed cow milk yogurt, fresh wild-caught snapper, persimmons, shitake mushrooms, red cabbages, scallions, baby bok choy, coconut milk, curries of all varieties, and those freaky, little organic garlics, gingers, lemongrasses, etc. in toothpaste tubes. (Purists, I can feel you cringing. You have far too much time on your hands.) These refrigerated tubes of pureed ginger or crushed garlic or whatever are simply magical. Maybe not quite as magical as a pasture full of soul-healing horses, but fairly high-ranking where road cooking is concerned.

What Best Western lacks in charm, it makes up for in kitchen space. When I say "kitchen space," I mean an open counter close to a sink and an electrical outlet where we could plug in our curtain igniter hot plate and pull off a bad-ass green curry coconut soup with seafood, mushrooms, and veggies. BAM!