Seventeen
Ludlow apparently knows its horror classics, but even so in the morning
we pull close the cardboard door of our motel room unharmed and get into our
Chevy, closely watched by two ravens. We have two deserts ahead of us: the
Mojave Desert and directly north of that Death Valley. In the hottest time of
the year. “Don’t leave your car. Don’t think ‘I’ll take a stroll’”, our
neighbor and only other guest in the motel warned us. “People die out there”,
he stressed. And because of the drought and heat you don’t find anything again.
“Not a trace.”
Just to be sure we stock up with four gallons of water at Ludlow’s mini
mart, fill up our cooler with a nice layer of ice cubes from the ice machine
and stuck two packets of chocolate chip cookies in the trunk of the Chevy. The
car is filled up, the AC buzzes like a charm. How bad can it be. As true
Dutchmen we have trouble taking any other power of nature besides rising water
seriously.
The day starts off at eight with a mild 85 degrees, says the Chevy
dashboard. Sweating is out of the question, because in there the AC blows and
out there the warm wind immediately whips away any moisture. With hardly any
other traffic around us we slide over Interstate 40. Now and then a car or a
truck full of shine and chrome pulling two or three trailers. ‘Mojave Desert
National Preserve’, says our exit for Kelso. ‘No services’. And then it’s empty.
Clumps of dry grass, an occasional warped bush, sand dunes, rocks and heat.
When we roll down the window to take a picture of the long straight road in
front of us, the heat flows into our air conditioned dome like a wad of cotton.
Behind the windshield of the few oncoming cars we still meet, a hand invariably
rises in salute. ‘Okay, buddy.’ Twisted cactuses, once suppliers of the
mescaline, stand with their badgered bark in the hot sand. When the road
descends approaching Kelso and Death Valley, the temperature rises to 98
degrees and the rock mountains turn into sculptures of coarse sand. Sometimes
irregular, as soft mountains. Sometimes unlikely straight and symmetrical, like
temples or castles. All that’s left here of the vegetation is an occasional
clump of tiny little flowers. Even the last motorist has vanished from the
scene. “Everybody is gone but me and you”, we sing along with Dylan.
The more the road descends, from about 3500 feet to finally 282 feet
below sea level in Death Valley, the origin of the name becomes clear. Hundred
and twelve degrees, reports Chevy by now. Along the road sits a tank ‘radiator
water’ for emergencies. We pull over, get out for a minute anyhow and taste the
dry crusts of salt on the bottom of what used to be sea. The water that runs
across the salty ground in tiny streams, gave the place its name: Badwater. Far
away the perpetual snow twinkles on Mount Whitney, at 14494 feet the highest
peak in the United States. We spread our arms to sense the heat practically lifting
us.
We spend the night at Stovepipe Wells, a wooden village right in the
middle of Death Valley. One hundred and twenty degrees, a thermometer in the
shadow reads. Only at midnight, as we lie watching the stars on the lawn in
front of our room, does the temperature drop a few degrees. I read Janny the
last bit of my notes about then by flashlight. After I’m done, I switch the
light off. In the dark, we hold hands.
When we walk in the morning over to the local diner for breakfast, here
too the ravens follow us, with slanted hips and their eyes fixed on us. “Kaaa,
kaaaa.” “Take care of us”, they’re saying, explains the man behind the counter.
They even knock on his kitchen door early in the morning. “Take care of us.”
And so he does. He knows them all by their sound and how frayed they look.
“They even talk to me”, he says. “Not in English of course, but then I say ‘hey
little fellow’, and then they chatter back in their own special way.” With a
tender look he watches one of his little fellows cram a piece of baguette into
its mouth, while another one is trying to trick him out of it and a third one
keeps an eye on us. “They’re something special”, he decides.
When later on we have repacked our suitcases and put them in the trunk
of the Chevy, all of a sudden things go wrong. The car key is gone. It can’t
be, but nevertheless, it is. I had it last, to open the trunk and now its no
longer there. While the temperature is already well in the eighties again, we
are searching in places where it never can be. Under the car, in the exhaust,
near the spare wheel, in bed, behind the television. The thing is and stays
gone. We have a spare key, but that is bound together on one ring that wouldn’t
open with the one that’s lost. Key, key, key, no key. Without keys we can’t
drive. Without keys we can’t switch on the AC. Without keys we can’t do
anything. Without. I drop in a chair.
“I’m so terribly sorry”, I say to Janny.
She has in the meantime reopened her suitcase and is throwing her
clothes on the bed because the thing has got to be somewhere. And than I see
it. Right where the slide in suitcase handle is supposed to rest. Slipped in
while lifting it, because now I remember that I’d put it right there. I walk
over to the suitcase and pick up the shiny bunch of keys.
“I’ll be damned”, Janny says.
We fall over backwards on the bed, right among the clothes.
“What did you mean anyway?” Janny asks.
“By what?”
“That you’re sorry.”
“I don’t know. Just. Everything. The stupidity.”
“Well, stupid it was, yeah.”