The Uneventful Drive

What do you see when told it's a pretty uneventful drive? It was magic. Several days after going through Joshua Tree National Park, the trip required retracing those steps to return through the Park, and on north to Las Vegas. It was early morning and there were almost no other cars.

The joshua trees were brightly outlined in the morning light. There were hills of jumbled rounded rocks. Piles of them stuck out in the middle of nowhere. In other areas mountains of multi-layered, colored stone had obviously been pried from underneath, up, up into to the sky.

The wind was firm, but not enough to remove a very distant level of haze. Up through the cholla forest, fuzzy cacti which look cute, until a close-up reveals the stiff spines. The sun is slowly rising, casting more direct light on the rocks and the profusion of flowers. Then over the hill on toward Twenty-nine Palms. The alluvial plain stretches for 50 miles below, the silent vista denying the "uneventful" nature of the experience. One can imagine long ago flows of water, carving out the hills, leaving small peaks in a succession of slightly decreasing shades of gray in the distance.

More hills and then moving into the Mojave National Preserve. Slowly the hills change from rounded on the top to the start of more powerful uprisings. Sheer cliffs of multicolored stratified rock. What are the layers? What was the climate like when they were laid down? Were there dinosaurs? (no, happened before the dinosaurs) The road moves through more valleys each with a slight change from the one before. There is an area of salt flats, and then a lonely mile long sand dune. In Kelso, there's a short wait while a long freight train rambles by. Then up onto the plateau, with more grand vistas, and another joshua tree patch. Now they're friends, sentinels insuring that there is watching happening, noticing the slow passage of time, and feeling the brisk wind.

Finally the spell slowly dissolves when the Nevada border is crossed, and suddenly there are more cars, all speeding to Sin City. Oh yeah, but the moment isn't lost, and is etched into memory.