The Roadrunner Club

Last night when we were on the rooftop deck, a pack of coyotes started up nearby, yipping and howling, their surprisingly high voices carrying in the still air. They paused, then started again as if they could not suppress a collective lament. In Borrego people with small dogs have to be careful. I wonder what a coyote makes of a bichon frise, besides a meal.

In the morning I went for a walk around the Roadrunner Club. The streets and cul-de-sacs of doublewides are interrupted and softened by a par 3 course lined with big palms and willows and non-native conifers. White-winged doves murmur in the palms, and mallards stand beside a shaded pond. The green, well-watered strip forms a rough circle through the Club, and seems more like a park than a golf course. Workers were out in utility golf carts, collecting downed branches, raking leaves, and mowing the already short grass.

Only one person was playing, a man in his seventies with an awkward, truncated swing. He stood in a tee box and hit one ball after another towards a not too distant hole. A coyote ran out into the open to sniff at a ball that had just come to a stop. Unimpressed, it sauntered on across the fairway, pausing only briefly to look over its shoulder when another ball fell nearby.

The Roadrunner Club is less than half occupied this time of the year. There are a few full-time residents, but most people use the trailers as vacation homes in the winter months. You have to be at least fifty-five to own at the Club. Most of the current residents seem active types: they golf, some bicycle around the grounds, they take water aerobics at the pool, they gather for potlucks in the Clubhouse. Driving around in their golf carts,they stop often to chat and laugh with their neighbors. Most of them fall into the golden years category: over sixty, under seventy-five, post-career, pre-the-ravages-of-old-age.

The state of the grounds, as well as the vibe at the Roadrunner falls somewhere between country club posh and trailer park seedy. It’s just right, bourgy comfortable, well kempt but not pretentious. I want to move in, and I don’t want to wait.

Prices are reasonable, and numerous “coaches” are for sale. One two-bedroom, two-bath unit, with new hardwood floors and new appliances, was going for just $42,500. Larry’s trailer, which is relatively down at the heels (though still charming, in a pale paneled-wood sort of way), is worth half as much. The catch is you have to pay $600 a month in club fees, though considering the pool and golf course, that doesn’t seem so bad.

Larry inherited his trailer from his father, Mac, a career Air Force man. Supposedly Mac’s ghost still occasionally makes appearances at the trailer, at least according to more than one past visitor. But I’ve never seen him. Larry says he would have approved of my short hair.

Larry and Sinda moved out to the trailer from San Diego almost twenty years ago. Before long they had a house built, and the two-bedroom trailer became Larry’s office and library and a place to house visitors. In every room there are crowded and sagging bookshelves, variously devoted to science fiction, rock music, Japan, China, postmodernist fiction, natural history.... And no stretch of wall is free from high, tottering piles of records, vhs tapes, cds, or more books. In the closets are numerous boxes of cassette tapes, retired but not discarded. It’s a trash house of texts.

A framed picture of Mark Twain hangs on one wall, of Johnny Cash on another. On the refrigerator is a thirty-year-old 8x10 of Sinda holding a machine gun and striking a Patty Hearst pose.

Since moving out to the desert they’ve commuted to San Diego (two and a half hours away) to teach, going into town for three days a week and staying at a motel. They’re now both nearing retirement and only teach spring semester.

Late in the morning I went for a swim with Larry and Maggie. I swam ten laps to try to make up for my recent sedentary ways. At eleven the thermometer at the pool read 102, a noticeable improvement over the 110 at the same time two days ago. I’m not kidding--102 or 104 feels manageable in comparison to temperatures above 110. One hundred sixteen feels ridiculous;after a very short time you just laugh, realizing there’s no way, and quickly move indoors.

The four of us, Sinda too, went for lunch at the Red Ocotillo, a restaurant housed in a small quonset hut. Curved ceilings are cool. I had the Large Mixed Green Salad dressed with a balsamic vinaigrette and festooned with kalamata olives and I was pretty happy.