Road trip diary, Day 4.

Yesterday's big adventure maybe sort of wiped us out. It took us awhile before we were ready for a plan.

At first, we were going to go drive by this one house in Twenty Nine Palms because it looked sort of fancy and avant-garde in the real estate magazine, and we were pretending that we might buy a house here.

"I think maybe it's just the light that makes the roof looks all those colors," the historian said.

"We could drive by and see," I replied helpfully. "Do you want to?"

"Naah," he said. 

Then we thought about driving into the park for a little jaunt, taking whatsoever hike or nature walk struck our fancy. Then:

Me: Remember when we were driving back on 62 yesterday? did you see that sign for the Big Morongo Canyon?

Historian: YES.

So I Googled it, and that's where we went.

Like so many places--oases--in the desert, this particular place is made of the availability of water (underground lake, subterranean rivers) and vegetation (willows and cottonwoods), which attracts birds galore. There are alleged (I'm not arguing) mountain lions and bighorn sheep. Snakes, of course, and bugs. Anyway, we decided to go take a small hike or two.

It was mid afternoon, and the birds were in audible evidence, but not much in visual display. Here and there, you could hear the trickle and burble of water. A little frog aria. 

We paused when a woman walking in front of us was, as I was, trying to catch the flight of insects in the light. 

bugs. and light.

"Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to rush you," I said.

This led to a conversation about a creature she spotted yesterday--she was so excited that it was hard to understand, exactly, what she was saying. It was a hummingbird--or a moth? a moth hummingbird? No, a striped hummingbird moth. 

"It landed on my phone--it's pink, so it was attracted. I didn't have my camera--" she gestured toward her camera --"so I couldn't capture it. I'm just looking for it, I hope I get to see it again. 

[NOTE: this is someone else's video, just so you can see what this strange creature
looks like.]

We lingered--more light, more bugs--as she moved ahead. A few minutes later, we ran into her again. She had her camera focused on a low bush in front of her. She gestured with energy at the bush. There it was.

I caught one quick shot before it sped off. She showed me hers, zoomed in. A flash of pink on its wings.

There are, allegedly, all sorts of hummingbirds that frequent the Canyon. We didn't see any of them. We saw a fleeting glimpse of this hummingbird moth, a rather large flock of crows gliding over the sky as the sun set, a butterfly. The air was fresh. We climbed up to a ridge to see the willows and cottonwoods, their shapes and colors, and the mountains in the distance. Another place people have taken the trouble to preserve, with its hidden water, its discreet birds, its forking paths.

Here and there.

When I was in Idaho, I spent some time rather virtuously preparing for my return home. I wanted to

• clean out my refrigerator, replace its burnt out light bulb, wash out everything
• wash the fronts of my cupboards
• buy a new mop
• other assorted Cleanliness Brigade activities.

None of which I have done. Instead I have

• nagged my son to do his laundry already
• spent some time on the internets
• pondered how much stuff there is to do and how very few days I have to do it in
• hmm, what have I done?
• seen three movies.

But tomorrow, I am going to make apricot jam. JAM. I bought the apricots today, oh boy, and tomorrow the Jammery begins. There may also be cherry preserves, who can say? Because they were still selling cherries today at the farmer's market.

Also, today I began reading the entries to a literary contest. [Insert gnashing of teeth.] I didn't so much agree to do this as fail to say no, and then whoops! There's a box of literary entries on my porch! With judging sheets attached to each and every poem! And horizontal lines for me to write comments! Come to think of it, it's kind of like GRADING. Gosh. And there are approximately 115 poems. I read nine of them and wrote supportive comments and then I had to take a break. So in and around the jam making tomorrow, I think there may be some judging. Judge not that you be not judged--is that what I hear you telling me? Then don't send 115 poems to me in a box with judging sheets--that's just asking for it.

TAGS: jam, judging, Biblical injunctions

The interesting bits.

I'm reading a novel, Moon Tiger, by Penelope Lively, a writer I've been only dimly aware of. I picked it up because Maureen Corrigan talked about Lively briefly on one of those end-of-the-year discussions of the best books of the year, on Fresh Air. This isn't the book Corrigan mentioned--this one won the Booker Prize in the late 80s. Anyway, I'm not crazy about the book so far--the main character, the narrator, seems to be smug and rich, condescending, and (worst of all!) a self-confessed terrible mother! (Yes, my feminist readers, this speaks volumes about me, I realize.)

However: I'm forging on because of these two passages which really spoke my language:

"We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that we speak volumes -- our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorized Version surface in supermakets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive."

and this:

"Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood -- we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time capsule."