On the Road - Arrowhead

The summer after high school graduation I had a trip to SoCal planned with some friends. There’s an established routine for driving to Los Angeles from Phoenix in the summer which always includes crossing the desert at night. You leave in the evening and arrive the next morning. It is still hot but not hot enough to actually kill you.

There’s an interesting phenomenon involved in approaching LA from the east at night. The desert is empty (and butt ugly) and quiet, but when you hit the edge of the LA megalopolis, even pre-dawn, you can just sense the buzz of the place. I don’t know if it’s the electrical grid or what, but when the power was out for several days in San Francisco after the 1989 earthquake, I noticed a similar “calmness”.

I hung around with my friends for a few days but my plan was to go camping by myself up near Lake Arrowhead. My friend was kind enough to drive all the way up there and drop me off with my backpack at a camp ground.  From there I was on my own. I either walked or hitchhiked where ever I needed to go. It's lovely up there. More of the SoCal canyon experience that I find so attractive. The roads were full of Easy Rider wannabes on choppers...

I was envious but I had already sold my Fiat and decided, because of the devastation of the Santa Barbara oil spill, to never own a motor vehicle again.

S__

In a tourist shop at Arrowhead I met a local girl, S__, and we started flirting. The strangest thing about this summer was that, after not getting the least bit of (amorous) interest from the girls I went to high school with, as soon as I graduated every high school girl I ran into wanted to crawl into my bed. I had spectacularly mixed feelings about this. In the end, my super ego proved to be remarkably stubborn while my id was frustrated and near suicidal.

The most dramatic instance of this phenomena occurred after my freshman year had actually started when a very pretty young girl who had been hanging around with one of my roommates found me at home alone studying (I'm pretty sure I was reading St. Thomas) and was fairly insistent about wanting sex. I was having some trouble putting her off when another guy came by and she went off with him instead. I now recognize signs of probable sex abuse at home in the girl’s actions but I didn’t have a clue at the time. The guy who went with her got gonorrhea and a bunch of nasty Penicillin injections for his sins.

Sally was a very sweet and affectionate girl and we had fun together but after a while she was harder to find and often late when we did get together. Years later, while playing with her charming daughter, I learned that Sally had also noticed those guys on the choppers who were not as reserved as I, and also, apparently, not fond of condoms.

About this time the weather at Lake Arrowhead changed and we experienced days of heavy mist -- like sideways rain. And since I was camping without a tent, I really mean “experienced.” I figured it was time to go home.

Returning to Phoenix was my first long hitch hiking trip and it started inauspiciously when the guy who took me down the mountain to San Bernardino insisted on sharing his home grown weed with me. I think that was my first exposure to Sensimilla. At any event, after taking just a hit or two to be polite, I was too stoned to stand when he finally dropped me at the side of the road. But I did make it back home in one piece which was the start of a portion of my life (cross country hitchhiking) that I can hardly believe I really did.