Going west, eventually south

I was on television once. I was coming out of liquor store in Borrego Springs and a reporter from a San Diego station held a microphone up to my face and asked why I was in the desert. It’s the sort of question one gets asked, I suppose, in July on a 108 degree evening (after a reporter has just tried cooking an egg on the pavement). I think I said something quasi-spiritual about the wondrous intensity of extreme heat. That was tv talk, though; in practice, temperatures over one hundred are only briefly intriguing.

Yet, I’ll be in Borrego in a couple weeks, available for interviews, going out very early in the morning, maybe, remaining hidden away through the middle of the day.

Borrego is just one part of the plan for the next two months, one of several deserty places. First comes semi-arid Boise, then Vegas, then Borrego, then L.A.; from there I’ll jet off to Australia, trading summer for winter, in Melbourne first (decidedly un-arid), Adelaide next, then a place called Coober Pedy, where I’ll meet up with my friend Rachael, who lives in Alice Springs. We plan on a three-week backpack trip in the nearby West MacDonnell Range (desert mountains).

Alix is coming along on the first stage, to Boise. Several times in the past week she has said to me, “aren’t you so excited that I’m coming with you?” and “do you know how lucky you are?" I take these as rhetorical questions, she doesn’t. But I agree, I am excited, I am lucky.

So this morning we set off westwards, together, in a VW camper van. Alix has identified, via the internet, two possibilities for restaurant lunch in Fargo. Somewhere deeper in North Dakota we’ll find a quiet place to park and pop the top.