Here are a couple of short accounts of my brother’s adventures in Death Valley. I suppose they could be called coincidences, although sometimes I wonder just how far you can stretch a coincidence. I was on the sidelines of these experiences, observing my brother but not experiencing anything “out of the ordinary” myself.
It was in the late 1960’s when a group of us from the Eureka area of northern California decided to take a road trip to Death Valley. I don’t recall all of the people who were on that trip, but there were probably ten or twelve of us, approximately the same number of men as women. One of the couples in our group had purchased an old school bus, and we made a group effort to fix it up to function as a house car complete with a picnic table bolted to the floor, beds and various types of comfortable chairs for the trip. There was a large wooden platform mounted on the top where we could ride for a more scenic, albeit rather dangerous, view. Of course, it might not have been very safe to change from the “upper level” to the main level while traveling because we had to do it by crawling out of one of the side windows and pulling ourselves up and over the side of the platform to the top. As unsafe as that seems now, that is how we did it while going down the highway. I considered us to be just a group of friends off on a desert vacation, but I suppose all who saw us considered us to be a bunch of crazy hippies. Both descriptions were correct. When crossing the Golden Gate Bridge on the way south, the toll taker didn’t believe that we were a “house car” so he boarded our vehicle to check it out. Since the table was bolted to the floor instead of being loose, we passed as a house car and saved some bridge fare.
On our way through San Francisco with our old school bus, we started the journey in the pre-dawn hours from my parent’s home in Sonoma, ending at dusk in the desert on the eastern edge of Death Valley. We entered Death Valley from the east side, down a winding narrow canyon in order to avoid tourists as much as possible. Before descending into the valley we decided to stop for the night and camp in an open area that was surrounded on three sides by high, many colored rock cliffs. We slept under the stars, which is how I always like to sleep in the desert so I can watch the beauty of the stars slowly circling overhead.
I woke up at my normal time before dawn when you can feel the air change to become cooler in advance of the glow of dawn. When it got light enough to move around I found my older brother, Michael, sitting cross-legged facing the soon to be rising sun in the eastern sky. As the light got brighter, the colors of the place intensified until we were sitting in the middle of an amazing palette of blazing colors on the walls of the cliffs surrounding us. My brother complemented that blaze of color because he had been up early working with a box of pastels. He had painted himself from head to foot with a wild, bright, sunburst design reflecting the reds, yellows, browns and whites of our surrounding – he was quite regal in his naked splendor.
I watched him for a while before asking him what he was doing. He said that he was calling the lizard to come to him. I hadn’t noticed that there was a fairly large lizard doing its morning “pushups” on a rock about thirty feet in front of him. Wondering how this lizard calling was going to work out, I just sat still and watched. To my amazement, the lizard slowly made its way across the ground until it came to Mike’s foot. Then it climbed up on him, making its way up to Mike’s shoulder, turned facing the same direction as my brother, and seemed to settle down to watch the sun come up! There was my brother Mike and the lizard, waiting for the sun to come up over the cliffs and heat up the day.
Our next camping spot on the trip was to be at the Race Track toward the northwest side of Death Valley. This place consists of a large, dry lake that has many small to medium sized boulders sitting on its surface. The boulders apparently move about on the surface of the lake bed, as evidenced by trails that they leave in the hardened mud, attesting to their movement. The interesting thing about this is that the trails go in all directions, even crossing one another at various locations. It appears that the rocks do not move in a coordinated manner, sometimes some go one way, and sometimes others go another. I have heard lots of theories about what causes the movement, and how the paths manage to cross each other, but none of the theories seem entirely satisfactory.
The road to the Race Track is a very long, desolate, dirt road through the desert. We had been driving for quite some time along this road, seeing no other vehicles, when we were stopped because a car was broken down smack in the middle of the road and we couldn’t get by. In the car was a man, his wife and his teenage daughter. Of course we got out of our bus to see what we could do to help, which apparently scared the man half to death. (This was about the time of Charles Manson, which had people a bit nervous about hippies in the desert.) The man made his women sit in the car, roll up the windows, and lock the doors while he got out to talk to us. He told us that his car had stopped running and wouldn’t start again.
We flew into action, bringing out the large supply of mechanics tools that we had packed under the assumption that our old bus would break down, and started to work on his car. He looked very apprehensive about all of us getting out of the bus, and even more so when we had him open the hood and we started taking things apart. At one point we had removed the carburetor and had taken it completely apart in our search for the problem. I understand being stuck in the middle of nowhere with a couple of women, and a bus load of wild haired, oddly clothed hippies would make any sane person nervous. We managed to get his car going (it was a carburetor problem), and he finally drove out of there – very relieved I would guess. He was so anxious to get going that he neglected to thank us for our assistance. We found his failure to thank us to be kind of funny, he surely would have if he had been in his “normal” mind – but this encounter was just too much for that. I don’t think he was aware of it, but it was obvious that his daughter wanted to get out of the car and join our fun. She clearly wasn’t afraid of the spectacle that we must have presented.
I found this entire event to be quite funny because of the range of points of view expressed by the various participants, and how that those points of view were shaping their perceptions and experiences. Our little group of “crazy hippies” wasn’t really so crazy at all. We consisted of a group of college educated and highly skilled friends and family, out for a fun adventure in the desert. When we came upon the stranded family in the middle of nowhere our goal was to help them out and make sure that they were safe – which we did. The husband’s view appeared to be that was in great danger, first by being unprepared and stranded in the middle of the desert and secondly by encountering a bunch of strange people and being forced to accept their help. The daughter’s view appeared to be that she was trapped stuck in the back seat of the car, rather than being able to get out and play with the hippies. All of these views shaped our interactions and our emotions. I found myself in a mental space where I stepped back and observed the event from the perspective of each participant, noticing the very different emotions that their individual assumptions were creating.
That night we camped next to the Race Track. In the morning we decided to go hiking for an adventure. We left camp just after sun rise, heading across the flat, dry lake bed and over the hills. We had no maps or other means of navigating; we were just planning on exploring the surrounding desert and return after making a large circle in the desert during the day. As we were leaving camp, my brother told me that he was going to get a bird that day. I found this to be a rather odd statement since there were very few birds in the desert that time of year, and we had nothing to “get” them with. I just nodded and wondered what that was all about.
We hiked up hills, down into valleys and across the desert going no place in particular, just wandering around, exploring the desert. At about lunch time we came upon an abandoned mine site. There were lots of old metal things, rusted vehicles, abandoned mine shafts and other evidence of mining activity. There was also an old, abandoned house trailer. The windows were broken out, and the door swung on its hinges, so it was obviously not really trespassing to enter it. My brother entered first, and I followed him. He entered through the back door and walked right to the front where the kitchen was located. He stopped in front of a kitchen cabinet, opened the cabinet door, reached in and picked up a perfectly preserved beautiful little dead bird! Its feathers were clean and shiny, with shades of blue and red glistening in the sun. So this is what he meant; he indeed did get a bird that day.