Bum Wines and the Peyote Coyote by Mike Marino (books to read in your 20s female TXT) 📖

wonder of the gastronomical world and as the sun began to set we started the small fire, broke out a guitar and my harmonica as Myrika sketched madly away in her book, Olivia unloading her camera for some color shots of the sunset, John strumming away on the Gibson to his own tune, and me playing along on harmonica, as best I could, to a desert blues tune.
Sunsets have a mystical sense all their own, but a desert sunset framed by the changing hues of the Panamint mountains is a Billie Holiday command performance at Kennedy Center. The Bad Water low point's highpoint is Telescope Peak, which is worn by the mountain range with all the flair of a ruby tiara adorning the head of a goddess. The peak changes hues in perfect harmony with the setting sun playing on it's rock solid surface, transforming it into a granite lava lamp 11,000 feet tall. At least that was the impression, and yes, it could have been brought on by the wine, or something. We talked and at times, not talked for timeless hours witnessing the sky darken itself into coal black, revealing the stars turned on as stage lights on opening night, filling the galactic auditorium with a band of diffused light that crossed the sky. The Milky Way was now Broadway and we had balcony seats for the big show. We heard the first note of the coyote chorus around 11pm and Myrika dashed for her tape recorder, which was one of those old, solid as a '57 Buick reel-to-reel portable jobs with pro model microphone, and watched her as she hoped for the best in capturing the call of the wild. The rest of the evening was spent emptying the cheap bottles of wine, watching the dying embers of the fire and basking in the glow of the camp lantern hung on the open side door of Big Sur. Not enough room to sleep all inside so we took turns each night. John and Liv one night, Myrika and me the next, and so on, so on, so on. Sleeping on the desert floor with it's surrounding silence, organic surface and night scents was more intoxicating than the wine. Yes, life is a cabaret old chum, but it's also at times a delightful Cabernet. By the way, we never did fly that kite that night. One of the highlights at night was the influx of AM radio signals that reached out across the dial like the tentacles of an analogue octopus. Fading in and out, one in particular was a strange gumbo of country, gospel and preachers. "Mansion in the Sky" would segue into "Walking the Floor Over You" by Ernest Tubb followed by a real fire and brimstone preacher whose voice would break as he hit crescendos in his plea to his audience to seek salvation. I listened to him every night, studying his voice patterns and one night I jumped up from the group sitting around a small fire and started in on my best imitation of Elmer Gantry at a tent revival on steroids.
At sunrise on our first Death Valley morning we were invigorated and ready to explore, so we packed up the gear after a light breakfast of sourdough bread dipped in black coffee, a chunk of cheese and an apple (regular breakfast on the microbus road) and the Bug Sur Expeditionary Force was on the march to the great sandy dunes and the rest of the valley.
We began to fancy ourselves old grizzled prospectors with burros or what is what like to be a muleskinner at the helm of the borax mule teams in the 1870's hauling the prized evaporite out of the valley and over the Panamints to the town of Mojave and it's railroad spur. Leaving the muleskinning to those better suited to it, we made forays into the Furnace Creek area on Highway 190 which intersects with the more remote Bad Water Road. Passing on the "wish you were here - it' a dry heat" postcards and any sort of guided ranger tour we avoided the human race and it's excuse for civilization as best we could. Not that we had anything against it, but when you live in an area where you are packed tightly into a sociological sardine can as San Francisco was at the time, it's nice to be in your own oblong headlong orbit in your own oddball solar system, at least until it's time for re-entry into the tie-dyed atmosphere of the times. Not only that, but we all had adverse reactions to uniformity and uniforms of any sort, including park rangers. (In the early 1970's I actually studied and trained to be one, and passed! Gasp!)
Big Sur was a feisty bus and dutifully carried it's human and other cargo through the valley and up into the Grapevine Mountains near Furnace Creek. We had old food and wine stained maps of the area at least 10 years old at the time but it turns out it was a treasure map to a colorful portal called, appropriately, Golden Canyon. A gorgeous gorge of sandstone in multi-layers of Cibola gold, sunset reds and fireball oranges. We parked the bus, grabbed a couple of camera's and hiking sticks to inspect the canyon on foot which in those days was a solitary affair and silence was as golden as the stone. Today, it's one of the most popular hikes tourists tackle and though it's not quite a pedestrian traffic jam it was nice to experience it one on one. Seeking the roads less traveled we purposely avoided sites and sights such as Scotty's Castle and the visitor center as we wanted to feel the desert as it was meant to be felt. Personal, natural and spiritually organic. Death Valley is more than vast expanses of sand and dunes. Diverse eco-sytems manage to live as harmonious friends in this arid version of Mr. Rogers Natural Neighborhood. The sand dunes are devilishly playful as they reach deep inside to the child in all of us to slide down them, run down them, tumble down them and even somersault down them at top speed as spaced out spacemen bounding about the surface of the moon in this lunar like landscape. Other areas are home to a Garden of Eden of desert plants and bushes including creosote, mesquite, pinon juniper, Joshua Trees and the signature plant of the desert, cactus, cactus and more cactus. There is surprisingly a bewildering array of wildlife so if you thought Death Valley was just lizards, rattlesnakes and spiders, oh my, you'd be wrong. Birds abound as do reptiles, fish and mammals including bobcats, mule deer (those lovable mulies), cougars and bighorn sheep in the higher elevations.
Geologically speaking there are granite mountains and sandstone cliffs, but it is also the home to a freak of nature Frankensteinian creation called the fulgurite. Not vulgarite, fulgurite. This tubular tribute to the power of electricity is created when lightning strikes the sandy ground and fuses the particles into bizarre misshapen hardened tubes, some with an opacity to them. Try to imagine a circus clown forming animals out of balloons in the center ring. Not exactly, but it is the closest analogy I could come up with.
Days were spent sketching, journal writing, movie making and photograph taking, not to mention kite flying. No trees or telephone poles to get tangled up in and if the thermal drafts were feeling generous you had an air show worthy of the Blue Angels. Photographing the sand dunes and their rippled patterns were a past time that kept the ever changing mystery of the desert fresh each day. The shapes would change subtlety while the shadows played tricks of light on the ridges of sand. It was the deserts own effervescent light show and more interesting than anything we had seen at the Filmore during a Grateful Dead concert.
The oddest moment was when a family in an Airstream pulled close to our campsite, but far enough to respect privacy, and turned out to be a family from San Diego, he a fireman, she a housewife, the shorter ones just kids. We had already been there for around a week and enjoyed every moment. He, the fireman, came over to say "hello" so we said "hello" at the juncture when middle America meets the liberal left. He invited us over for coffee later that night and we brought our wine along and offered it to them. Then the most puzzling utterance occurred when he said, "We're only staying a few days and heading to the Grand Canyon, so what is there to do here to kill time?" Kill time? Time was a non-concept in Death Valley and besides, why would anyone want to kill it? We told him to go fly a kite, and at first he looked insulted, at least until Liv went to the bus and returned with one of the kites to give to his kids.
Soon it was time to say Happy Trails to Death Valley. We had managed to enjoy her serenity, her solitude and the bounty of her gifts of beauty and mystery of nature. Now it was time to pack up and head back up California for the Bay Area. We decided on the route that would take us north to Yosemite an El Capitan fix before leaping headlong back into the Bay Area madness that was the Sixties. We'd miss the coyotes and the sky full of stars, but had memories and impressions that would last a lifetime and to this day visit Death Valley whenever I am in the area as though dropping in on an old friend. Myrika eventually had to go back to Germany, bad visa, John is now since long gone and buried, Oly bolted to Minneapolis in 1970. Death Valley however remains as a reminder of those days. I only wonder what ever became of the microbus. Oh, yeah, the desert made such an impression on John, that he renamed her Bad Water.
TOM JOAD & THE HAIKU HOBO
The times, they were a changin' in the purple hazed and double dazed days of the spare change Sixties. Political and social change were waging war on the status quo and old icons were being replaced. Even Route 66 was changing. At one time it was the main vein two-lane connecting the Midwest, where I am originally from, through the desert southwest to California, where I was living in Haight Ashbury at the time. The old road, once proud, was now being replaced section by section by the new interstates and fast becoming a fading memory reminiscent of Norma Desmond in "Sunset Boulevard." Being the vagabond that I was I was fortunate to have traveled through the deserts on Route 66 by thumb and by micro bus before the last asphalt curtain call.
Route 66 kicks the doors of perception and imagination of open road freedom into fuel injected high gear. Mainstreet USA has carved out it's own iconic niche worldwide as the ultimate long and winding road by using it's machete of nostalgia to cut an asphalt path through eight states including the southwest American desert.
More than just a "road", It's in your face roadside culture that wears the intoxicating perfume of nostalgia and automotive history. Phillips 66 gas stations, Harvey House and the Harvey Girls, old diners and cafes, motor courts, roadside and natural attractions, along with enough motels bathed in pastel neons to light up the Vegas strip.
Yes, you do get to travel across the country on the old concrete girl, but also back in time along John Steinbeck's River of Immigrants, as it meanders through the cactus kingdom of the great southwest. The 2,200 plus mile Mother Road is a mother lode of legend and lore, and the desert