The West Coast Super Trip

    Aunt Julie and her friend Laura took me on a 20 day road trip around the west.  We started off driving down the coast, making it all the way to Crescent City, California on the first day.  We explored the Redwoods and walked around a bit, then stayed in Berkley, a suburb of San Francisco, in this cute adobe house belonging to an old friend of Julie's. 
    Then we continued our drive down the California coast.  I've never felt as cool as I did there.  I bought these shades and borrowed a leather jacket from someone- definitely Cali style.  The coast was teeming with surfers, wild waves, and big green mountains.  We stayed in Santa Barbara with another friend of Julie's.  Santa Barbara is one of the greatest towns in America.  The streets are lined with palm trees and gardens, and the downtown area has flags of all colors, shapes, and sizes hanging off the sides of buildings.  It had a rather festive atmosphere; all of southern California is like that.  My God, I even got into a bar, and I was only 11.  The Sonics were playing the Jazz in the Western Conference Finals, and all these Lakers fans hated the Sonics, so I was the only one shouting for joy when the Sonics won that game.  Suckers! 
    That night I remember showing off my Mario skills by defeating the entire game of Super Mario World (SNES) for that woman’s son.  Soren was his name, and he hadn’t ever been able to get very far playing it.   I hadn’t played it in a few years, but I still managed to show him through the levels.  Super Mario World is a lot like our own.  There are different landscapes and creatures on every corner of every island.  Being the state with the most amount of ecosystems, California might resemble it better than any other.  If only there were mountains made out of chocolate there, then it would be a perfect replica.  (In fact there is a place called the Chocolate Mountains in this state, but I don't think they taste like chocolate!).
        Then came the notorious ferry ride from Long Beach to Catalina Island.  On the ferry we met up with my other aunts, my uncle, and my adorable grandmother.  That was when all Hell broke loose.  They all vomited on the ferry due to some extreme sinusoidal wave action.  Luckily, I was the only one who didn't.  I’ve never even gotten seasick before, and I’m not sure why the rest of them did.  There must be some biological mechanism that warns humans against being on the water, reminding us that we really belong on land.  This is non-existent for sailors, so perhaps there’s a bit of the seafarer’s blood in me.
        Avalon is the Catalina “capital”, a total night town.  Why were we going there of all places?  My other aunt Mary, who was a comedian that owned a sushi bar there, lives on the island and that’s where she was getting married.  She’s somewhat famous on the island; she’s been in television commercials, one which I saw early in childhood.  She could be more famous than she already is, but Julie thinks she’s never wanted fame, which is why she stays there.  Anyways, the atmosphere of that wedding was her in a nutshell.  It wasn’t a traditional one set in a mansion or church.  This one was set in a tropical garden, and had a man who was balancing a fruit basket on his head as he walked down the aisle.  People were laughing the whole time.  Everyone was so laid back, and I couldn't believe what was happening because I'd always had a more traditional idea of what a wedding was supposed to be like.
        After the wedding we said goodbye to everyone, leaving on the same boat we came in on (no one vomited this time).  I navigated us through the maze of freeways in Los Angeles and we made like roadrunners for the desert.  My aunt was impressed with my navigational skills.  My whole family thinks I'm a navigational prodigy, taken after my grandfather who was a pilot in World War 2.  The first indication that I had above average visual intelligence came about when I was about three years old and sitting in the back seat of a car.  We drove past the street that lead to our house and I indicated that we had passed it.  My other aunt Kathy was amazed that a three year old who didn’t even know how to communicate could have the ability to do that.
    A lot of times when I came home from school, I’d look at maps and imagine what each place on them looked like.  I’d project myself onto the maps and imagine myself traveling on their roads, approaching any major city and national park my mind saw fit.  I’d known what the Seattle skyline looked like, but not any other cities.  My mind didn’t care though; it had the power to construct buildings out of thin air, and I even tried to draw some of the skylines that had conjured inside my head.  That’s why going on road trips is one of my favorite things to do.  The reality of a road trip always confronts my imagination with surprising results.  Los Angeles was definitely one of those cities I’d imagined driving through, so to finally accomplish that was something I was proud of doing.  Fortunately, we didn’t get stuck in any of the city’s notorious traffic jams!
    Anyways, I digress.  Where were we going after L.A.?  You guessed it- Las Vegas, the quintessential party town!  But Vegas was only a pitstop- no bars or fun there.  It actually rained when we were there, can you believe it?
        The road trip only got better as time went on.  We drove up into Utah and hiked the Zion Canyon.  I remember feeling like an Indian warlord because I’d found a walking stick that was in the shape of a spear.  I’d use it to ward off invisible enemies on the hiking trail; ones that threatened to kidnap the people I was protecting.  After Zion we saw Bryce Canyon, which has a grand assortment of rocky columns everywhere.  I remember being utterly baffled by nature for the first time when I saw that place.  It has a certain otherworldly quality that demands one to expand their mind, or admit that everything they knew was only on the surface of a much broader sphere.
        It snowed on our way to the north rim of the Grand Canyon.  The canyon was everything I expected it to be.  You can walk on the rim and there are no railings.  It totally freaked out Julie, but not me.  I made it all the way to this "island" out there, where there were vistas of the canyon on all sides.  The atmosphere of that vista is something I’ll never forget.  The only bad thing about it was that other tourists were swarming over the views, too busy taking pictures to really appreciate the scenery.  I am dismayed by modern tourism's mantra, “Lets take a picture and walk away", even though I am guilty of it sometimes.  It rips the heart from a genuine experience and pastes it on a piece of paper for eternity.  Call me old school, but I’d rather live in the present and soak in the experiences of my travels instead of worry about what they’d look like on camera.
    They introduced me to a lot of weird music on that trip - techno and acid jazz.  I remember the strange sounds of Depeche Mode, Delerium, Waterlillies, the Blade Runner soundtrack, and the freakish yodeling of an 808 State song.  Stuff I had never heard before.  It made the terrain all the more atmospheric for me.
    The scorching barrens of the desert yielded to the soaring peaks of the Rockies as we headed north on I25.  We hardly stopped at all in Colorado.  Pike’s Peak was but a drifting stranger on the north breeze, and Denver was too boring to pass up a nap on.  Wyoming was much of the same, but this time we veered away from the Rockies on our way to the Black Hills, in South Dakota.  There we saw the Crazy Horse Memorial, which would be the largest sculpture in the world if it were finished by now.  It’s carved out of a mountain that’s even larger than Mt. Rushmore (which we saw later).  Only the face of the great Sioux warrior was finished when we saw it; the rest of his body and the horse he rode on was just a huge chunk of granite that hadn’t even resembled the forms they were supposed to take yet.  Rushmore didn’t impress Julie all that much.  She’d been expecting that quartet of presidents to be larger and more awe-inspiring than it appears in photographs.  But Mt. Rushmore isn’t the kind of Herculean wonder that stands out on the horizon the way Mt. Rainier does.  After all, the grandiosity of man-made objects still pale in comparison to those of nature.
        If you’re ever in this part of the country, the Badlands is a place that can’t be missed.  Only 40 miles away from Mt. Rushmore, it contains some of the largest Oligocene fossil beds in the world.  Its hills are made by sedimentary rocks that were eroded by rain and wind to form bizarrely-shaped ridges that are stratified in color.  They’re separated by large grasslands that are fed on by bison and bighorn sheep.  The Lakota tribe called it “Mako Sica”, or “bad land”, because of its extreme temperature and scarcity of water.  Walking in that strange landscape, we heard the disturbing sound of rattlesnakes slithering on the sand as the sun set over the pointy ridges.  We spent a spooky night in one the cabins in the center of it all, hearing a wind that howled over the sands all night, as if its mission were to make the area’s namesake felt in the base of one’s spine.  One of my mom’s dreams is that some biker will steal her away and take her here on a motorcycle, but she never tells me who it is.  I imagine it’s probably Bruce Springsteen; he wrote a song called Badlands and it’s one of her favorites.
        The next day we started west, finally heading in the direction of home.  A major thunderstorm surprised us in Wyoming; it was terrifying and beautiful at the same time.  The raindrops were as big as water balloons and the lightning was as thick as the veins of Thor.  Bolts of green, red, purple and gold dropped from the clouds in stupendous arrays of synchronized color.  Laura tried to take a picture of the lightning, but it was too fast for her.
        Just after crossing the Continental Divide, we saw a long range of snow-capped peaks off in the distance.  This was the Teton range, which oddly lacks any foothills on its eastern side, offering travelers like ourselves some stunning views from Jackson Hole.  The range’s name derives from “les trois tetons”, so called by French voyageurs when they thought the mountains resembled three breasts.  These mountains, known for their aesthetic charm, are an icon of the west, and have been shown on film in several westerns.  Grand Teton, the largest of them, stood majestically in a tear-jerking scene from the movie "Shane".  My experience of seeing it was every bit as moving and memorable as it was in that scene.
    Julie's car, the poor little Mustang, was exhausted after driving up another 8,000 foot pass.  I think by then we were all getting a little travel weary.  I couldn't wait to get home after 16 days on the road.  Idaho, Oregon, Mt Rainier, and back to Seattle we went.  I'll never forget arriving at grandma's just in time for Sunday dinner, the look my mom gave me when she saw after being away so long, and the Sonics winning the Western Conference Championship over the Jazz, all in one in evening.  It was a prime time for celebration and story.  I am very privileged to have witnessed such amazing things at an early age.  Thanks, Julie & Laura!