Inner City Outings - Anza Borrego Volunteer Trip with Sherman Heights Community Center

Volunteered again with Inner City Outings, took a group of kids from the Sherman Heights Community Center out to Anza Borrego with perfect weather and the flowers in full bloom.

I caught a ride on a carpool with other volunteers, there was Katy driving, and Michelle, Kevin, Liz and Me all headed east on Hwy 8 to Ocotillo Wells then North into the hills and washes of the desert, and we rushed the entire way, our fear going back and forth between the highway patrol and being late to meet the kids, but in the end it turned out we were early.

We stretched our legs and smeared our faces with sunblock and met another volunteer Mike, the kids all arrived soon after and they leaped out of their bus and poured over the ditches in the sand, jumping over everything, trying to pick up boulders, soaking up the sun after a long drive. Their mothers called after them to look out for scorpions but I explained to them that the only poisonous ones to really worry about don't live in California, and they felt calmer.

Then, another group of kids came running up claiming to have found gold, and before I could say anything the kids and their moms were all picking the stuff up all over the ground, until I explained to them it was only mica, then they were disappointed, but in a moment they were appreciating it and talking about it being "just as pretty as gold anyways."

The first kids to discover the restrooms were amazed at the toilet, the simple deep hole in the ground, and I told them they had to climb all the way in to use it but not to worry, there was a rope ladder and if they got stuck on their way back up I would help them.

We started out on the rocky trail, following a moist stream bed, in search of an oasis. Some heavier moms and their kids started filtering towards the back, huffing and puffing, but they never complained. They smiled and grunted and when they had to sit for a rest they would apologize and say how beautiful it was.

A worried mother asked about some tracks in the mud, could they be a lion, a wolf? They were honest and earnest when they pointed out some shoeprints and discussed how you could tell it was a sheep’s. All the flowers and cactuses were in bloom, it was a gorgeous sight anywhere you looked. We stopped for lunch at an oasis and everybody got out their goodies to share. I told some kids asking me about some boulders, that inside they were made of pure silver and that people cut them open with lasers, that’s why there were a lot of smaller rocks laying around, they were the husks of this jewel fruit. They spent the rest of lunch trying to figure out a way to carry out a meteor-size boulder between the two of them but ended up leaving with only wild dreams of treasure.

Then a little girl found a crazy looking spider and nobody would pick it up until our trip leader Jim told us it was a striped species of daddy long legs and it was safe. I picked it up and passed it around the kids, when one of them passed it to Mike, he kept a straight face but got rid of it as soon as possible and whispered to Katy how much he hated spiders.

We continued on some Indian trails, zig zagging through the hills, and now the kids each took turns being the leader and trying to navigate through the rocky maze. The kids loved being in charge of the entire group and feeling like captains in the wilderness, watching them I thought about how important it is for kids to feel that sense of responsibility in a positive environment, for them to develop a sense of self-empowerment later in life. Exactly the reason why I'm climbing for Big City Mountaineers.

At the end of the hike, I walked and talked with a small little girl who had a tiny mumbly voice but would never stop talking, story after story. Finally understood that she wanted to race me and ran all the way back to the bus, so hopping over little boulders and dunes and cactuses, we took off, and of course she won.

Villager Peak (5755 ft.)

Late again, wasn't out of the car and on my way until 11.
I picked up a hitchiker 2 blocks from my house on the bridge before the 5 freeway entrance. He was lanky and dressed in levis from head to toe, his face was clean but dark and worn, and he told me his name was Rafferty and he said he was headed to Tucson, Arizona and he couldn't tell me what for but he gave me the rest of his life story. He used to work on every sort of plane, he was a riveter, but he could work on engines too, and somewhere along the line the Government put a chip in his brain that enabled him to speak every language in the world. He doesn't know why they did that to him, and he said he didn't remember performing any missions but it could be that they were erased. So somewhere along the line, his chip is damaged and now when he speaks in different languages they all come out at the same time and he'll talk for example in "Eskimo-Hungarian-Lebanese" or "Chilean-Japanese" and what he saying will make sense but other people ust dont know those dialects. "So you can see the difficulty I have in communicating with ordinary people who don't have the chip." I drove him as far as the Golden Acorn Casino then turned back around to get on the 79. Rafferty I hope you find your Big Rock Candy Mountain in Tucson! Where dreams go to die!
Villager Peak came into view as I drove down the S-3 into Borrego Springs. Speeding towards it, it seemed to shrink away into the distance the closer and closer I got, it seemed to runaway from me, and I became so anxious and aware of the time I was losing that I'd catch myself staring at the peak and yelling at it to stop running away, instead of looking at the road. Finally I hit S-22 and was headed towards the trailhead where I would retrace a failed 12 mile route from before (I had underestimated the climb and run out of water in august 109 degrees, I turned back only a mile before the summit). Instead, I remembered what I'd read about some Italian climber who'd said something like "Let a drop of water fall from the summit, that is the line I will climb." and I decided to climb in style instead. I did a u-turn on the highway and turned onto a dirt road and drove straight towards the face of the peak, past some trailer camping sites,to the edge of a dry lake bed. A sign said no unauthorized vehicles were permitted to drive on the lake bed so I parked my car and began my hike from there.
I ran across the entire dry lake bed, anxious to get started on my way UP, I couldn't stand wasting any more time moving on flat ground anymore. Dust devils danced and dissolved around the bleached lake bed, egging me on. I still had more than a mile of mazing of washes and rock slides to get through before I'd be on my way UP.
An hour after leaving the car I came to the base of the peak and found what I thought was the steepest route of ridges and started up in what was now a race against time because although this time I'd brought along 2 flashlights, I'd realized that I still had no way to find my way back to the car at night, there being no markers around the lake bed. I came up with the idea that I could use lights on highway as sort of moving fixed stars like a sailor. I took note of the distant reflection that was my car, its position to the highway and to the start of my climb, then tried to formulate a triangle to remember and follow on my way back. I hoped it would be enough to get me near enough to my car in the dark to locate it with the car alarm on my keys.
Sprinting up the ridge I was constantly checking to see how much further I had left to go, trying to calculate if I would make it to the summit and back down in time to find the car. After a while I decided I should just dedicate myself to reaching the peak no matter how late it got, I took my watch off and stuffed it in my pocket and kept up my burning pace. I ditched the helmet I'd brought and my extra jug of water to shed some weight.
The peak kept up to its old tricks, moving further and further away, this time as I approached on foot. As always, what looks like an easy jaunt up a nothing hill turns out to be a death march up a mounatin that felt like it was growing bigger and bigger underneath me. I weaved up boulders and thornbush on a 60 degree incline, occasionally sparking a rock slide but nothing ever serious. I never stopped to eat or rest for more than 2 minutes, eating and drinking on the run. Heat and solitude played the same 20 seconds of a song on repeat over and over in my head all the way up and I couldn't wait to wash them out of my head with something new once I got back to the car radio. During moments of lucidity I took a look around me and smiled at where I was, tromping up a very beautiful very inconvenient piece of the Earth, where only mountain lions and bighorn sheep bother to walk. It refilled my heart with enough gasoline to blast up a dozen Villager Peaks.
During last 1000 feet before the summit an old toothache kicked in with the altitude and colder air (below 5000 ft and above 8 or 9000 ft my tooth is fine, weird), blind with pain and out of breath I finally hit the summit. I stayed just long enough to carve my name in the register with a pen that didn't work, and I took only one picture with the camera on timer and hoped that I would come out in it. I had a glance at a sliver of the Salton Sea on the other side of the peak but couldn't make myself care enough to spend 5 extra minutes hiking to a good viewpoint, by now my toothache didn't even let me walk straight. My tooth blowing up trains inside my head, and my small hope for making it back down the mountain before dark, I just needed to get back down as fast as I could.
In my rush down I made my descent following a different set of ridges, and several times I ended up slipping into some loose rock slides and had to backtrack onto one of the main ridges. I never found my helmet or extra water so I began saving my drink for when it would be dark. I also started a lot more serious rock slides on my way down, after every one I would sober up and concentrate on better steps. Better to make it down late and in one piece than battered and dashed on a bunch of boulders and cactuses. I came to terms with having to suffer a much slower and laborous descent in the dark and dedicated myself to slower smarter footwork. It did get dark before I was off the peak, but my salvation I suddenly saw a half dozen campfires starting up around an oasis at the edge of the dry lake bed. I headed staright for it.
Making my way back over the washes, my first flashlight died after half an hour and I was still only a third of the way down the rocks. I recalled getting stuck lost at night with my friends Will and Kevin outside of Alpine two years ago and us finding our way back using a cell phone and holding it to the ground for miles, for 4 hours, following some old tracks in the dark. Covering this much ground covered in boulders and no trail, using my cell phone to find my steps, I wouldn't make it to the car anytime before the middle of the night.
Bless my preparedness for once, the extra flashlight. While I continued heading towards the set of campfires, three times I clearly saw pairs of green eyes in the bush. I always forget what color lions have and I hoped that they were only the coyotes I'd heard earlier. Just to be safe I barked and yelled threats to whatever mountain lions there might've been and gripped my axe ready to swing it at a missile of fangs that I kept imagining leaping at me out of the darkness.
And now the campfires were running away form me too. I had walked for what felt like another hour but the fires were still just as small as when I'd first seen them. They refused to get any bigger and offer me any comfort. Then suddenly I could hear voices in the close distance and gasps and headlights turned to look at me. Turns out the fires had been tiki torches all along, setup by a desert touring company who had a wine and cheese dinner going on for a dozen people under the stars. They had a fancy little camp setup, and they offered me a glass of Pinot Noir and some melted camembert and I promptly accepted, but then something in me told me I had to finish before I could start relaxing, and I wouldn't be finished until I was driving away in my car. I told them I had to go. I thanked them over and over for just having been there and explained how lost I would've been otherwise, I thanked them 2 more times, and I was on my way.
My plan was to follow the tour company's truck tracks back to the trail where I'd left my car. Halfway across the lake my second flashlight began to die. I began running. I used up everything left in me real quick and then decided I'd keep the light off and turn it on every 100 steps or so to make sure I was still on trail. When I turned the light off it was another piece of luck, the lake bed was so white that even under only starlight the wheel tracks that had dried months ago in the mud stood out of like a great black snake against the white. I made the rest of the way back in the dark, worried for a second that somewhere along the way I might follow the wrong set of tracks and end up on some empty side of the lake but I convinced myself I could head towards the moving lights of the highway and I'd be fine. I sang loud underneath the million desert stars, an entire repetoire, until eventually the reflectors on my car shone back from my flashlight and I made a beeline for the nearest gas station to get a celebratory Coke in me and then home, to ice my legs for the next 10 years.

The First Little Wilderness

I was something like 9 or 10 when I went to spend a couple of weeks of summer with my cousin Pam and her family in the desert out in Palmdale, California. Pam was a couple years older than me and she lived on the very edge of the desert the very last house before the desert began, the street stopped being asphalt and turned to sand right past her driveway, her backyard shared a chainlink fence with the wilderness. It was magical to me and her house was like a pillar right at the gate of all the unknown, but in reality wilderness what, a lot of it was dumping ground for tires, refrigerators and dead cars, and a place for desert rats to drink and go shooting. It was a good-sized piece of land and it was big enough for me to learn my first taste of that consuming desert silence, but to most everyone who lived there it was an inconvenient square in between highways and housing developments with not much use but to go off-roading, or a boring nothing to be driven past and ignored on the way to the nearest strip mall or high school.
I was still new to any part of the world beyond my block, and the desert was some beckoning land of death, terrible, a mystery, unforgiving and deadly and uncharted and paradise to me. I begged and bribed and goaded my cousin to take me as much as possible. It was nothing new to her and it held no romance or appeal over her as it desperately did me. Living there for years in the heat and the boredom, my cousin wanted to treat me to the pleasures of her air-conditioning and her swiming pool, the last thing she wanted to do was walk around in the heat and the sand, but she took me out anyways and put up with my dreaming, and we'd go hunting for quail stalking them for hours with a real bow and arrow, and we never once saw a single quail but it wouldn't have mattered anyway because every arrow I ever shot flew straight at some rock I wasn't aiming for or else fell by my feet. Or I'd get Pam to tramp up different "mountains" with me, nothing really but scrawny rock hills full of boulders and scree but I'd take an effort in finding and picking the hardest stupidest way to climb up, up and over every jagged thing trying to take advantage of every potential jump and ass-slide and I turned those hills into crumbling death ascents. We "mined" mica in ziplocs and ziplocs chipping it off with hammers we'd brought from the house and I dreamed of selling for a fortune what turned out to be worth nothing more than shiny dandruff. We looked for mountain lions in every shade and hollow, fearless out of ignorance on my part and fearless out of the awareness that there weren't any around on my cousin's part. Once Pam told me about some friend of hers who wasn't allowed to go hiking without taking a snakebite kit along then I dreamed of one of us being lucky enough to get bit and the other having to "suck out the poison" like in the movies.
That desert was like the sea to me. It couldn't have been more than a day's walk across, half a day even, but there were gullies and dunes were I could lose sight of all the houses and the road and I was good as dead for finding North, then, it would turn measureless and unmappable, and I could be a little boy's idea of a man. I remember myself like a very ambitious Lenny, overgrown, sloppy, excitable. I was also stubborn and I believed that I could smell my way back home or something like it, but all I could do was get my cousin and me lost and then I'd swear we were supposed to go "this way" and I would tap into my keen sense of direction I was so sure I had and would get to show off now and I would strike out over and over. My cousin would try to explain to me the obvious direction home and she was never lost, but I would explain to her how she was wrong and that I remembered because I took notice of this certain bush see and its just past this turn or just past these rocks or wait, just past this turn and these rocks, or wait, and eventually she just let me navigate an idiot's line of loops until it got close to dark and she would step in and steer us home.
I remember my aunt telling me about finding scorpions inside boots that had been left out on the back porch and I remember my cousin camping with me on the deck by her pool and I saw the stars big as baseballs for the first time in my life. No kid whose never left the city before ever forgets the first time he sees the stars as more than just some quiet pins on a muted blue night sky but sees them so bright he can hear them like loud suns thrombing out of a pitch, black, real night.