Читать книгу Salvation Canyon - Ed Rosenthal - Страница 7

I.

THREE MEN HELD a massive desk just outside my office. I stepped aside as they hoisted it through the doorway, carried it to the corner, and placed its plain oak top just under the window ledge.

“Thank you.” I held the front edge and leaned over the top of the five-by-eight-foot gift from my client.

The lead man gasped, “Okay,” and I gave them each ten bucks. The last man pulled the yawning door closed. It was a bear of a desk — and it had been a bear of a deal to close. Don Clinton had sent his father’s desk to thank me.

I pulled open the flat middle drawer and found a crinkled ad from 1932 for a meal at Clifton’s Cafeteria. “Two eggs, bacon, and toast for $.05 cents, coffee included.” I pulled the tarnished handle of the top drawer on the left and found an old wooden contraption with a weight and a balance for measuring, and under this, a pamphlet with a drawing of a clock and bold print across the picture that read, “The clock strikes twelve.”

I’d been heading out the door and was already late, so I shoved the pamphlet in my pocket and headed out for the press conference through the marble hallway whose mahogany moldings pointed the way to the elevator. The long corridor was strung with lamps from the 1920s, opaque deco glass in sinuous black metal frames. At the polished brass elevators, I pushed the call button.

In the lobby hung a globe etched with a deco goddess lit from within by a glowing yellow bulb. Through the etched-glass entry doors onto the street, it was a short jaunt to the corner of Fifth and Spring Streets where The Preacher stood, a black man with a bible in his right hand who held forth below the historic cornices and large glass windows. I crossed Spring Street to the Rowan Building and saw, as I did each time, the shadow of the first landlord I dealt with here in Downtown Los Angeles. The vision of him, a bedraggled man in a black raincoat, screamed, “I’m going to kill that mother fucker!”

Walking these streets, my mind was haunted by memories of people I had dealt with. But the upper levels of the street were inhabited by mythological dreams. The bas relief carved into the granite base of the Stock Exchange Building reflected my own weariness with business. Crafted eighty years earlier by radical immigrant stonemasons, the huge central panel shows a goddess of enterprise with her arms draped around Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. At the old Alexandria Hotel, floral moldings and hour-glass balustrades decorate the roof. Classical statues stand out from the corners of the grand old hotel as the ghost of the old hotel owner barks, “I don’t need any fuckin’ broker to tell me what my place is worth.”

Crossing Fifth Street, I was disturbed by ghosts of County policy. A decade ago, councilwoman Jan Perry pleaded with deaf Supervisors for homeless facilities. From south and north, now the sidewalks were lined with people opening and closing their bedrolls. A scene that extended deep into the Toy District.

I stepped over a sleeping woman wrapped in a dirty blanket sprawled across the sidewalk. A bent, old man covered his mouth as he coughed and extended his other hand asking for an offering. I moved aside before a wheelchair could knock me down.

At Sixth and Spring, the scene brightened. Slim young women in skirts that floated just above the bottom of their hips blended with lost young men in stained fatigues. Swank new clubs and restaurants had recently opened inside the historic bank buildings.

A thin yellow tape on plastic orange posts diverted traffic at Broadway and Seventh Street. Across the glass front of Clifton’s Cafeteria, a ceremonial ribbon had been draped awaiting the ribbon-cutting ceremony. It signaled the end of seven arduous years. I’d closed the deal.

People are not intrigued by real estate, but a large crowd had gathered, covering the sidewalk and spreading out into the street. This particular deal had captured the public’s imagination. It was the well-known disposition of the founder, Clifford Clinton, who provided free meals throughout the Great Depression, and the environment he’d created, an inspiration for Disney’s Disneyland, with its faux forest and cute wooden bears climbing trees and a giant redwood stump at its center.

A podium was positioned on the historic terrazzo sidewalk. I was just in time. I elbowed my way through the crowd, circled the last of the orange posts, and closed in on the building’s metal facade, where the City councilman’s spokesperson had a pair of large cardboard scissors in her hand. A panhandler extended his palm: “Do you have a cigarette man?”

I wriggled sideways through a line of reporters and positioned myself a few feet in front of Jessica as the ceremony began. Don stood at the podium. “We finally found someone to carry our family legacy.” The buyer stepped forward. The cafeteria workers were in a line along the curb, their ears open for news of their future.

“We will continue the legacy of Clifford Clinton,” the buyer said, and the workers applauded with relief.

I stared at Jessica, who bathed everybody in congratulations, but had forgotten me.

“Our office has worked closely with the Clinton family and Andrew the preservationist to bring this to fruition and…” My glaring gaze caught her eye. “I see Ed Rosenthal is here, the Historic Properties Broker who made the deal.” Mission accomplished. Don and Andrew took positions beside her, and with all their hands on the make-believe scissors, they cut the red satin ribbon.

Clogs of die-hards lingered and exchanged memories. Some recollected the cute little bears; others, Easter Sundays with pecan pie. I drew Don and Andrew to my side below the CLIFTON’S sign and had a bystander take a photo. With the phone back in my pocket, I walked away.

After seven years of deal making, I was done rolling file boxes through parking garages into elevators. We had found a buyer, and a check would be made payable to me. I took a lighthearted walk north on Broadway to Sixth Street. I wouldn’t be in Downtown L.A. for at least a week. I wouldn’t speak to a broker, buyer, or seller of real estate. I was on my way to the Mojave.

I got into my car at the parking lot on Sixth and Main, exited in front of the Pacific Electric Building, turned left, went north to Fifth Street, and within a few blocks was on the Harbor Freeway. My mind drifted back to my first dead-end job in Los Angeles as an overnight security guard at the chemical plant on Terminal Island.

My headlights lit the dark as I parked in the plant’s empty lot. With a giant step on a concrete stair, I opened the metal door. The tiny room had a desk with a worn book wrapped in red tape. The cover read “Security Guard Manual.” There was a schedule on the first page that indicated rounds every half-hour. It mapped out a series of stops along corridors with pictures of each security station, where the guard was to insert and turn a key as he made the rounds. Silver-taped pipes hung above me as I stumbled in the dark on wood planks to reach every spot to turn each key. The lumpy pipes rumbled overhead. I kept walking, hesitating at the turns as the route on each floor turned unpredictably. Sometimes the pipes above bent in a different direction or just flopped and hung in the dark. The walk along the planks on each floor corridor ended in a narrow metal stairway ascending to the next level. The floors were unevenly spaced. The higher I went, the darker it got.

The spooky memory left a smile on my face as I merged onto the 10 West. Traffic towards the desert was on the other side of the road. I’d be in my quiet, enchanted place tomorrow, but now the trunk of my car held the chaos of packing and unpacking my life over the last few years through three different firms, and it needed unloading and reorganizing. I got off the freeway near home and drove to Bed Bath & Beyond.

The felt-lined trunk had books, clothing, and hiking gear stuffed in every corner. I wanted to help it reflect my new priorities, whatever it was I finally felt free to focus on. I walked into the feminized box canyons and looked around, below and above, at the crated and loose offerings. After a few questions, I realized my needs weren’t standard.

“What do you have for dividing up parts of a trunk?”

“There’s some wire boxes, if you turn left by furnishings.”

Those proved rigid and ugly, so I drifted on, through the corridors to the registers and special offerings in bins. A woman with a cart full of toddlers and boxes passed by. She had a cute rattan container in her loot.

“Excuse me, where did you get that rattan piece?”

She pointed over the head of one toddler to the store’s rear corner near a sign that read “Returns.” I wriggled through a sea of females and found them: the woven boxes with an auburn tinge and no loose ends. I saw how to use them and took one in each hand. In the busy parking lot, I opened the trunk, pushed the loose items to the back and made room for the new boxes. I placed the ten-inch rattan box on the left and the six-inch-high one adjacent so both would be right in my face when the lid swung open. I filled them with my priority items: Cliff Bars, compass, emergency lights, water purifier, and knife. With all my books in the short rattan case, I made a miniature mobile library shelf.

I called my wife. “Honey, you’re right about Bed Bath & Beyond. I found the best little containers.”

“Oh, that’s great, when will you be home?”

“Probably by four-thirty.”

“Did you check the weather report for the desert?”

“Don’t worry about that. I have to pull off. Let’s talk later.”

She was concerned with the weather.

At our terra-cotta tiled complex, the wide wrought-iron entry swung open. After waiting for a few screaming kids on bicycles to move aside, I got through the gate. At our unit, I turned the car around to back into the garage and left the trunk popped open so Nicole would see the baskets when she got home. Excited to position items in my new rattan containers, I carried my empty water bottles through the laundry room and crossed the white entry tiles to the kitchen. She had prettied up the entry counter with a bouquet of plump pink and violet dahlias in a small silver vase. I filled my red and blue hiking bottles to the brim, tightened the black tops, strode back to the garage, and shoved the glistening vessels snug into my newly installed left compartment. When I saw the bottles in their new setup, it felt like my brain had been rearranged.

I headed up the beautiful hardwood stairs that led to our second story landing. An Armenian craftsman seemed to pull these perfect oak planks from his hat. My wife had access to artists and artisans. She’d grown up in Los Angeles, so she knew people like the young woman who’d painted the beautiful blue and rose canvas hanging above our couch in the living room. It matched a jade end table with flowers etched into its sides.

We’d met through a matchmaker after I’d had an epiphany while alone at LACMA one day. I was on a bench in front of a Roy Lichtenstein lithograph. I was forty and had been dating the wrong women for a long time. I wanted a child but was nowhere close to finding a wife. The Lichtenstein female seemed a caricature of the many women I’d met, with sexy red lips and overdone lashes. Her face was shocked. She held her head in her hand. The cartoon bubble read, “I can’t believe it. I forgot to have children.”

From the padded bench, I stared at the lithograph. Oblivious to the men and women walking in front of me, standing behind me, admiring other art in the gallery, it was as if Lichtenstein had knocked me on the head with his knuckles.

“I forgot to have children.”

I enlisted a Jewish matchmaker and for fifty dollars got a great deal in meeting my wife, a kind-hearted social worker. Nicole, a lovely, petite blonde, who felt like home.

When the time came for one of my trips, I was a whistling tea kettle with my old friend Frank’s happy marriage advice steaming out the top. I needed to get to as remote a place as I could, even if my wife knew where I was. The further she had reached in to get hold of my adventure, the less I liked it. After I sold the groundbreaking 2121 Lofts project, a conversion of an old industrial property into a gardenlike community, and got a huge commission, I went on a hiking trip in New Zealand. I was thumbing through magazines in the lobby when the concierge announced, “Your wife is on the phone.”

“Hi, Honey, enjoying your trip?”

“Yes, it’s fine.”

“I tried to arrange a special massage for you but the schedule got screwed up.”

“That’s okay. You didn’t have to do that.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong. You know I don’t like contact on my trips.”

Now passing by Nicole’s makeup table, I saw myself in the oval mirror above her gold and green perfume bottles and open makeup trays. The mirrored doors of my closet were open. I pulled down the soft black bag I used for my desert trips. I hardly needed anything — just some shorts and a short sleeve shirt for my day hike Friday. Then not much more than a paisley yellow and white bathing suit for laying around the pool on Saturday. With the travel bag on the satin comforter of our bed, I tossed in my white short-sleeve shirt and tan shorts. I filled the bag with three pairs of underwear, a few t-shirts, and socks. It took all of five minutes to pack.

Downstairs, the garage door opened and shut. I heard Nicole’s heels click across the entry tiles. The downstairs bathroom door closed. After two minutes, I heard my wife’s voice bounce off the landing and into the upstairs hall, “Hi, Honey. Getting ready for your trip?”

I walked out of our bedroom, down the corridor, past a watercolor of desert rocks. “Yeah. Did you see my new containers from Bed Bath & Beyond?”

“They look nice,” she shouted up the polished wooden steps. “Honey, did you hear the weather report for the desert?” There was a measured, false lack of urgency in her voice. I disappeared into the bedroom again and waited a while, then went back on the landing. Nicole was already in the kitchen, so I projected my voice, knowing it would reach her.

“It’s just my usual trip.”

Her steps returned. “Maybe you should just lie around at the pool. A heat wave is scheduled to hit the desert just when you’re going. This weekend.”

“Don’t worry, it’s the same hike I always do. You have a lot planned for the weekend, right? Aren’t you picking up Kathy from the airport?”

“Yeah. Are you going to the same place?”

“I am. Don’t worry, it’s the same place I always go.”

Thursday, after a jerky night’s sleep, Nicole and I went downstairs. I filled my cooler with salads, milk, and juices for the trip. I’d done this same desert escape ten to fifteen times. Aside from a three-hour hike, I’d spend most of my time lounging around the motel getting stoned, writing poetry, and reading. I rushed the cooler out to my car before we sat down for breakfast. I filled my bowl with the special granola I bought for my getaways, and Nicole handed me some milk. The grocery bag on the kitchen table bulged with bread, chips, and treats from Trader Joe’s to accompany me in the passenger seat on the long ride to the desert. My wife hid behind her newspaper as I gobbled down my cereal, clutched the bag in one hand, got up, crossed the laundry room, pushed open the door to the garage, and threw this last item into the car. It was launch time for the long-anticipated break for freedom. I rushed inside to the kitchen and gave my wife a quick kiss on her forehead, careful not to interfere with her daily practice of obituary perusal. “Have a safe trip!” she turned from her pages to say.

“I’ll call Sunday as usual. Anything you want me to tell Hilary?” I was meeting our daughter.

“No, don’t worry.” She got up and kissed me goodbye.

The garage door clanked behind me, and I began to relax. The tension below my eyes that had felt like my nose was crunched up in a frown left me now. I leaned back in the seat and let my hands relax on the steering wheel. With one last thing to do before I headed to the desert, I took the 10 Freeway west to hook up with my daughter in Santa Monica. I was an hour ahead of our meet-up time so I went into Forever Twenty-One to fulfill a longstanding father and daughter tradition.

I told the clerk, “I’d like an $18, a $36, and one $54 card.” By making sure each was a multiple of the number eighteen, I threw in the extra blessings of Jewish mystical numerology. She was turning twenty-one but still felt to me like the fragile four-pound infant she had been when they finally released her from the neonatology ward.

Two months after her birth, I had carried her from our car. Nicole was in the bedroom getting the bassinet ready. The mummy-like bundle wrapped in soft white cottons sat beside me on the wide living room couch. I called out, “Nicole, what should I do with her?”

“Nothing. Wait a minute.”

I looked down at the doll-like face and withered, afraid to touch her.

“Okay, bring her in.”

“How should I carry her?”

“What?”

“Never mind.” I held Hilary out in front of me with stiff arms, carried her into our room, then placed the delicate being into her bassinet and breathed again.

Hilary opened the door to the bagel place in Santa Monica, and I walked up to meet her. We hugged hello. Her hair was tied in a comfortable bun, and I didn’t notice any new hair colorations or extra piercings.

“How is everything going?” I asked the bubbly young adult.

“Everything is very good, Dad.”

“Your new place is so close to Santa Monica College; it will be easy to get to school. Have you picked out a major yet?”

“No, Dad. But probably teaching.”

Grateful that Hilary had survived her birth, we had given our only child a lot of freedom. Now a grown woman, she had spent two years circling between her classes in Santa Barbara, friends in L.A., our home, and her aunt’s place in Santa Ynez. I handed her the gift cards.

“Dad, that’s so nice.” She kissed my cheek. We walked past the sprinkle trays at the ice cream niche and then up the promenade to Forever Twenty-One.

Hilary asked the clerk, “Do you have a chair for my Dad to sit in? He always waits when I shop.”

The clerk pulled out a chair from behind her counter. I visualized Friday afternoon. I saw myself approaching my car in the parking lot at the end of my glorious hike and taking a seat on the rear bumper to remove my boots, tossing them into my trunk and slipping on my loafers. I felt the drive down Route 62 to the motel. I would park and go to my room to put on my bathing suit and grab some snacks. After a few steps down to the rust pavers of the pool landing, I’d be lying back, mission accomplished, totally relaxed at a spot under the roof awning with a black shadow covering me. I’d have the New York Times handy and some Medjool dates in a bowl.

“I finished.” My eyes opened, and I went around the counter to meet her. She had a stuffed bagful of clothes in her hand and a smile on her face.

“Everything worked out great. I have one coupon left. I’ll come back with Berna next week. Look at this cute blouse.” She held it against her chest.

“That’s very pretty.” I smiled without examining the pattern or colors of the item. I cared for the ritual. When she was little, on Sundays I’d roll her in her carriage to the local deli. After I lifted her out and set her in a baby seat, the waitress would tie a bagel around her neck.

Hilary and I walked out to Main Street, then turned into the ice cream shop. We sat down with our cones, and she asked, “Are you coming back on Sunday, like always?”

“Yes, for sure,” I said.

A few quick turns and I reached 4th Street to pick up the 10 for the drive to the desert. Once I passed Downtown, it would be a straight shot. With my bag of goodies beside me on the passenger seat, I felt lucky. I had closed a deal on the Landmark Eastern Columbia at the same time as Clifton’s. Two deals in the heart of the financial crisis, right before totally running out of money. I was elated. My career and family life were steady, and I was free to detach myself from everything.

I had come to Los Angeles in 1976, shortly after giving up on a college teaching career in New Hampshire because the technical economics required to complete a PhD put me to sleep. I wanted a more romantic, manly career, and spent six years drifting through furniture finishing, cabinet making, and carpentry. But I finally accepted the advice of a carpenter, Loren Evans, who told me as he handed me my last check, “You ain’t no carpenter, a cabinet maker maybe, but I doubt it, you better ride that horse in the direction it’s going.”

I loved Loren Evans and considered him a real man — he ran an all-male construction crew and was assertive, proud, and physically capable — so I took his advice as gospel. I’ve always been sort of like an empty beach onto which active males would swim up and land. I was always interested in men, not as sexual partners, but as an admirer of their active stances and their proclivities. I wanted to be one. I wanted to know what made them the way they were. And as an empty beach, there were always men landing.

The first whom I loved was Douglas Moore, one of the black kids I met when we moved from the Lower East Side to Rockaway Beach. I had just run a schoolyard race and had lost to Eliot Blum, a frail boy in my fourth grade class. After the race, I stood by Eliot and was grimacing at him when Douglas appeared from nowhere and told me in a casual and friendly tone, “If you want to fight him, you have to fight me.”

In no time, I decided to skip the battle and befriend the aggressive black stranger. I admired his forwardness and friendly manner, so when a few months later, he and his brother Terrell trapped me on the street with my shopping cart full of my mother’s groceries and pretended to steal them, I knew it was a hoax. Terrell had rolled the cart away and yelled, “We got your food.” But I could tell that confident Douglas was sharing a game with his younger brother. Terrell brought the cart back, and Douglas said, “We were just kidding.”

In my teen years, the projects filled up with a pack of new males. Larry Schnitzer stood out. He had come from a tough area of Brooklyn. I met him outside the fence of our junior high school as I was doing my paper route. He stood on the sidewalk in front of me, opened his hands, and motioned in all directions. He regaled me with stories of his fantastic victories against all odds. Dancing in his shiny loafers and carefully pressed slacks, he mimicked a gangster shooting a machine gun. “Crazy Schnitzer” became one of my best friends.

Even though I took the words of the charismatic master carpenter Loren Evans to heart, I had no idea what direction to go. After a few years and a series of dead-end white-collar jobs, I drifted into commercial real estate and got traction in a niche market. Drawn in by the beauty of the abandoned financial district in Downtown Los Angeles, I managed to coexist with a garrulous bunch of ethnic landlords inhabiting the area. At first it was weirder than weird for a former instructor and PhD candidate of a liberal bent to work side-by-side with an avaricious tribe of landlords, but they trusted me and totally distrusted each other — and with difficulty, I made deals with them.

Now, I drove by in a string of cars winding along the rim of the downtown center with the glass-skinned towers of the financial district off to my left. I told myself I’d sell one of those sixty-story buildings one day. The San Gabriel Mountains beyond them hugged the horizon, and the high-rises looked like children’s toys watched over by a graying grandmother. The mountains are the ancestors of the basin.

If mother earth were a broker, she might say, “I opened escrow on the deal twenty-eight million years ago, when I locked the Pacific Oceanic and North Atlantic Plates in a grind against each other.” When the two plates locked, friction between them built up until the earth’s crust broke, creating a visible fault and pushing up mountains. First, the earth’s crust has to move. The heated mantle is thrust upward, building mountains as the molten rock is released. It took the San Andreas Fault the twenty-eight million years to build the rim of ranges in the background of my two-hour voyage across the basin. The Santa Monica, San Gabriel, and San Bernardino Mountains. The San Andreas Fault is still active and heads east, like me, cracking the earth along its way.

My first date with Nicole, I took her to a Bukowski play on Traction Avenue where artists were first reclaiming the old lofts. I then dreamt about a woman in a gold lamé blouse and took it as a sign when Nicole wore a gold lamé blouse on our second date. Things moved quickly. Nicole came from a comfortable, down-to-earth family in Beverly Hills. Her mom and dad greeted me warmly.

I was selling a building for a nattily dressed landlord who took me to lunch one day. I told him of my upcoming marriage. “You’re getting engaged?” he asked, wiping his mouth. His sapphire cuff links shone in the dim basement. “Ed, get your wife used to the fact that you go away and she doesn’t know where you are.”

“Okay sure, Frank.” I nodded my head.

He walked me up Olive Street and opened the trunk of his Mercedes where he stored a beautifully pressed outfit and full leather set of men’s toiletries, always at the ready for his getaways. He winked, “Even if I just want to get hot dogs in Brooklyn.”

His advice was valuable to me. He was another real man who had landed on my empty beach. I respected Frank. He was an upscale version of my tough Italian friends in the projects. Once, he locked an entire family of jewelers in his building all night because they wouldn’t follow building hours. His words left a mark because I wanted to be like him, but I lost contact with Frank after the deal closed. That happens with a lot of clients. Being discarded like a used condom after a transaction was one of the things that was hard for me, but that wasn’t what happened with Frank. He had a heart attack a few months after the deal was done. He was hit hard and wanted me to remember him the way he’d been.

A few years later, Nicole and I were in Palm Springs. We were with another couple, and the husband brought up this great hike he had discovered in his LA Times. He suggested we should try it. I loved hiking and agreed right away. I’d been a regular in the Santa Monica Mountains, so I was game for a hike in the desert. When I got into his van, the guy seemed a little full of himself, but I’d been around plenty of guys like that. He explained how there were a few routes we could take. He mentioned how we could pick up Indian Canyon from close to where we were and go through Desert Hot Springs but that it would be better to drive Highway 111 to the freeway. I didn’t really care how he went. I was used to men like him making decisions, especially when you’re in their van on a trip they suggested, so when he told me we would take the interstate through the San Gorgonio Pass, it sounded fine.

It’s a lot easier to take a panoramic view of things when somebody else is in control, and I was enchanted by the startling pieces of desert landscape along the way, starting with the giant San Jacinto and San Gorgonio Mountains we saw on our way to the 10. Route 62 rode a steep incline through hills of green grey shale, the small flat pieces resembled backgammon tiles ready to flip and roll downhill. The road quickly bent east, and in another ten miles we turned off at Joshua Lane and drove into Black Rock Canyon Campground.

Jerry held the map out in front of him as he led us from his van through the continuing display of desert landscapes: a meandering grey wash, then a series of undulating yellow canyons, then a green woods with large fern trees and huge boulders on an angular hillside. The strenuous uphill climb ended when we poked our heads into the air at the top, pulling ourselves onto a large dirt plateau, and saw the gorgeous vista to our south, a wide cobalt sky, the tan sands of Palm Desert, the jade green Coachella Valley, and snow-capped San Jacinto Mountain. I was soul-struck and hardly heard him say, “I’m going to walk ahead to find the other view,” as he left my peripheral vision.

For the entire walk down Warren Vista Trail and Black Canyon Wash back to the car, I was silent except for repeated exclamations of, “Wow, that was amazing.” Once inside his van for the ride down Route 62, I must have repeated “what a gorgeous view” often enough to make an impression, because when we got back to our wives and stepped from his van, he handed me the article. “I’ll probably not go back there,” he said, “but you seemed to really like the view, why don’t you take this.”

“Thanks, Jerry.”

Before we rejoined our families, I put it in the trunk of my car. I had fallen in love. I had found my mistress.

For the next eighteen years, when I finished a big deal and needed to get out of Dodge, I hiked to Warren View and recovered that exhilarated state of mind. As Frank had instructed me, I got my wife used to the fact that I went away now and then — without leaving a name, phone number, or address of the place I was going. Every rendezvous, I took off from the Swiss Health Resort in Desert Hot Springs, headed for the Black Rock hike, and spent an afternoon of bliss on the plateau lying in a comfortable perch above the trail and gazing across the Palm Desert at magic San Jacinto.

The LA Times article, with its map of the hike, moved with me from my black Saab to a green Jeep Cherokee, then to a black Highlander. On the early encounters, I took the map from the trunk and carried it along, also checking my directions with a compass. But after I learned the route by heart, I stopped using either and left the map behind.

I don’t remember seeing it when I organized my things in the rattan baskets.

I passed through undulating Moreno Valley’s cobbled hills of sand and grey until I reached the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains — the gorgeous sisters of the San Gabriel range. Lines of patient cars crawled up towards Big Bear and Arrowhead resorts. I continued east towards the haunting wasteland that’s been a beacon for dreamers and outcasts for centuries.

In the shadow of monster trucks, my Passat reached the San Gorgonio Pass, the only passageway to and from the high desert in the 1850s for resourceful rustlers who fattened stolen cattle in the high hills of Joshua Tree, then drove them through the pass to markets on the coast. I passed the off-ramp to Palm Springs, where the pass opens to a mile-wide expanse of wavy grasses, rimmed by the brown foothills of the mountains, and dotted by giant wind turbines.

I turned right off the interstate and picked up Route 62 for the short stretch to Desert Hot Springs, pulling off at Indian Canyon to arrive at Swiss Health Resort, the same restful place I always stayed. The lot in the rear was uncrowded on the hot afternoon, and after a few rings on the buzzer, still nobody came to open the motel registration room. Then finally, ruddy-looking Ursula, the proprietor, came up the steps from her private rooms to greet me.

“Hello, Ed. So nice to see you.”

“Same here.” I sat on a couch as she went behind the counter to get my paperwork. She was writing up my bill. “So, when is breakfast?” I asked.

“So sorry, Ed. We stopped offering breakfast.”

“Not enough visitors this weekend?’

“We’re not set up for it anymore, with the financial crisis, and some of the regulars stopped. But I just baked some multigrain bread; if you like, I can get a loaf.”

“Sure.” I nodded.

She went back to her place, and I recalled Ursula’s busy breakfasts in past decades — I saw people waiting to fill up on Swiss Muesli, hard-boiled eggs, fresh vegetables, and colorful jams of berries and prickly pear. As I wondered when exactly was the last time I was there, the smell of her wonderful multigrain bread came in. It distracted me from telling her where I was going the next morning. “Here you are.” She handed me the bread and bent her silver head over the paperwork, wrote the $5.00 bread charge to my total, and addressed me from inside her space. “Karl is still doing the water-massage, would you like that?”

“That sounds good.” I had never tried his special massage in all the visits to the place. It sounded like a fantastic way to start the weekend and might actually wash the last buyers off my skin.

“He has a 7 p.m. opening. Is that good?”

I floated face up in the indoor pool on that Thursday night buoyed by multicolor noodles. Karl stepped into the water and greeted me politely, but without any warmth, in his Swiss accent: “You’re here for a one-hour water massage?”

“Yes, I am,” I answered, knowing how relaxing it would be. The tall, muscular man walked behind me to cradle me in his arms and began to massage my back. He carried me to the center of the warm pool.

“Do you like firm massage?”

“Yes.” His stiffness impressed me. It’s not like he hadn’t seen me fifteen times before. Or hadn’t talked to me about the special access his property had to the underground hot springs. But I knew I was in for a treat. I thought about the Allstate Insurance ad, “You’re in good hands,” and I closed my eyes. His finger tips pressed across my waistline from hip to hip, then he massaged my back, moving upward and outward from my spine. I went into a reverie. I imagined myself leaving my room in the morning to take my car up Route 62. I’d reach the campground parking lot, and, dressed in my shorts and short sleeves, would tackle the familiar trail, finding my way from the black-pebbled channel to the yellow grasslands and up to the green forest for the view. I saw myself eating lunch nestled in a crag above the trail, across from San Jacinto and the Coachella Valley. Then, I would drive back, and everything would be like always, a blue-sky feeling on the pool deck of the resort.

Karl and Ursula had invested in new beds and bedding. I pulled back the coral and yellow weaved covers and untucked the lower edge of the fine cotton sheets from beneath the mattress. My travel bag lay unopened on the second bed. I set out my outfit for the hike: my hiking socks, short sleeve white shirt, underwear, and shorts. I cut two thick slices off Ursula’s luscious bread and slathered both with crunchy peanut butter, then gingerly placed these together, cut the sandwich in half, and wrapped it in aluminum foil. Ursula had left several delicious tomatoes on the kitchen counter. I took one and put it in the fridge in a plastic bag with the peanut butter sandwich. It was close to 10 p.m. when I filled a glass with some cold goat milk and then finished off half a bag of Sara Lee Bordeaux cookies. When I closed my eyes and pulled just the right layer of sheets and coverlet over me, the last thing I noticed was my box of granola, next to the sink, waiting for morning on the kitchen counter.

For all my anticipation of a wonderful day, I woke on Friday morning very weak in the already warm room. Once my feet reached the floor by the bed, I ran to the bathroom with cramps from diarrhea. At 7 a.m., yellow morning light illuminated the asphalt lot. At its edges, the view of grey desert gravel and scraggly grass was very unmotivating. My mind agreed with my body’s weakness, and despite the months of anticipation, I told myself “forget the hike,” flipped on the swamp cooler, crept under the covers, and slept.

Two hours later, my cell phone woke me up. It was Britten, a client. We had circled beneath every beaux-arts facade and each goddess and gargoyle of the historic core, as if we were Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, and we’d still not found him a deal. When he realized he had awakened me, he suggested we talk later. Foggy, I stumbled around the room. It was around 10 a.m., and if I were to take the hike, I was two hours behind schedule, but I decided to go. I threw on my outfit. I left the box of granola untouched, opened the fridge and filled a glass with peach juice from Trader Joe’s. The glass slipped from my hand, and I watched shards disperse on the linoleum. I bent to mop up the little glass islands from the peach sea. Standing, I tossed the paper towels in the trash, then grabbed my peanut butter sandwich and tomato and headed to the parking lot, determined to reach the gorgeous vista.

I stopped for coffee. After grabbing a styrofoam cup to fill, I noticed a family in the front window nook at a white formica table. The waitress had just brought some sunny side up eggs on white plates with bacon. She leaned over the bony-armed father to pour his coffee. The t-shirted man smiled at his son, and the buxom wife in a work shirt beamed at the kid. I turned back to the vat and flicked up the dispenser. The waitress behind the restaurant grill window asked me, “Anything else you want?”

“No, but where is the cream?”

“There is some milk over there.” She pointed to a jar of powdered milk on a high shelf. I scraped the crust off the powder top, then mixed some in my coffee. My eyes were drawn to the family in the nook near the door. To avoid them seeing me seeing them, I focused my attention on the brass staples circling the backs of the red Naugahyde chairs. They matched the metal-buttoned suspenders on the man’s jeans. The waitress in her white apron brought the family English muffins. The man buttered his, and I watched the melting gold fill the crusty crannies before he dipped it in his pooling orange yolk. He savored the egg and smiled to his wife as if he had sold The Bank of America Towers. With my neck craned over, to keep an eye on the family, I waited for the waitress to return from her conversation with the man working the grill in the kitchen, then asked, “How much for the coffee?”

“$1.50.”

I carried the foam cup in front of me, down the center of the café, and as I opened the door by their niche, the wife said, “Sure, Honey,” to a request from the little boy and leaned forward to stick a bacon strip into his mouth.

I continued up Route 62. After miles of broken windows and shuttered storefronts, I reached Route 248, the west entrance to Joshua Tree National Park and Black Rock Canyon Campground. The access road led to the ranger station, where I usually parked. The wooden building had a sign that read, “Park Closed,” but cars had filled the spots.

I drove down to the regular parking lot, which was packed, and after searching for a spot, I saw an old, bearded guy standing by his trailer.

“Hi, I’m on a day hike. Do you know a place I can park?”

“Right there is okay. I’ve seen hikers leave their car in that place.”

“Thanks, that’s great.”

I pulled my Passat into the dirt across from his red trailer. The kind of space you would not know is there until you make it. Heat hung over the lot. Knowing it would be even hotter as the day wore on, I was in a rush to get going. It was hot enough to leave my jacket in the trunk. I glanced at the red and blue water jugs in my new wicker containers, but I was in a hurry and figured that I had enough in the camelback for the usual three-hour hike.

I stepped away from the silver trunk onto the sand and strapped on my pack. Still a little sleepy, even after the coffee, I asked a last question of the white-beard, “Hey, can you remind me where the access trail is to Warren View?”

“Sure.” The helpful man pointed thirty yards away.

It was close to 1 p.m. I strolled up an incline from the campground to the road, and the familiar white water tower appeared behind the trail. West on the dirt road to the trailhead, I kept a steady pace until a brown and tan coyote stepped out of the scrub and met me. Instead of circling to avoid contact, it planted its paws in my path. The trailhead sign was visible between his ears, almost as if he were park property.

For the first time in two decades, a coyote was blocking my way to Warren View. Its black snout ten feet away. The brown-tinged auburn fur against the brown twigs of the desert. The narrow eyes above the white chin. We stood in the heat above the beige and green tents in the campground. He seemed to address me. Me, in my white short-sleeve shirt and beige shorts, the coyote in its beige fur, tinged with white.

It was late midday toward the end of September; any hikers would already be well into their hikes. We stood and waited. The auburn fur on his hump rumpled in a warm breeze. I leaned on my hiking stick, watched until the creature turned and crossed the high weeds behind it. Its bushy tail left the road and blended with the white buds of dried borage and disappeared. I headed to the trailhead.

The trailhead sign came up in fifty yards on the left side of the access road, and I crossed over to take it at about 1:15 p.m. I planned to be back at my car by 4:30 p.m. The familiar sandy trail was lined with dried shrubs and succulents, and after about a quarter mile it reached Black Rock Canyon Wash, where the trail started in earnest. I stepped down into the forty-yard-wide, pebbled channel and, out of habit, turned right. I didn’t need to reconnoiter or correlate my direction to any compass point. The wash didn’t have a drop of water in it. Lined by a landscape of short grasses and rocks, shriveled purple prickly pear blossoms, and dried yucca wands that had sprouted in spring, the wash broadened and shrunk as it rose on a gradual incline for about a mile.

After a mile, the wash passed a set of ramshackle water tanks made of large rocks which settlers used to collect water and feed cattle, and where I had a memory of my daughter calling me five years earlier and proudly announcing, “Dad, I passed my driver’s test finally,” as I dreaded the day she would actually be on the road. At the same place where the tanks sit, the wash turned steep and dragged on my ankles as it narrowed to about thirty yards across.

I stepped along on the steeper gradient still inside the wash, the only change being that I was conscious of the drag on my boots and pebbles falling off each time I lifted my foot, leaving deeper footprints in the sand. A half-mile past the rock tanks, I reached a familiar change in the landscape, yellow grass hills no more than fifty feet tall. The trail continued uphill on a looping dirt track weaving through a series of narrow canyons all inhabited by brittle scraggly weeds. Occasional Joshua trees lined the dunes. The hot sun hung in front of me but disappeared inside the relief of each canyon. The rock trail disappeared at times, when my footsteps led directly into one of the grassy hills, but I knew from past trips to continue circling through the maze in the general direction of the sun. After a half mile of circling through the maze, I reached a fork in the road with signs to Warren Vista and Warren View.

The air was stale and hot with a small breeze. The heat was excessive, though the lid on my hat kept the glare from my face. As always, I chose the sign to the right towards Warren View. The trail steepened a bit and continued up for a hundred yards then ramped up a green hillside, where the grass hunched close to the ground, woven into sparse patches alongside large white boulders, fir trees, and junipers. The trip up the steep, wooded hill took twenty minutes. At the top, I arrived at a plateau under a large sky with a row of trees at its extreme edge. My heart raced. It felt so good to be closing in on my cherished view of San Jacinto. But I also felt some time pressure. I rushed along what was left of the trail, an indistinct footpath twirling through the foot-high, windblown grasses of the plateau.

A gray cone of stones and dirt appeared. At about one-hundred-feet tall, it was the dominant feature of the landscape before me, and it would make the perfect point from which to view San Jacinto. I stepped through the indistinct grass path without paying much attention until I saw a sign I’d never seen before. A hundred yards beyond the cone, in that row of trees at the far edge of the plateau, the sign read “West Trail.” I walked ahead to the high, conical pile, but when I got there, I was still confused by the sign. I walked past the cone and craned my neck left to search for the West Trail sign on the line of trees but saw nothing. I gave up the search for the black and white letters, walked back to the cone-shaped pile, and took my first steps up.

I had never mounted this cone to see Warren View, and having never seen this formation before, the steep angle of incline surprised me. Loose stones and dirt rolled out from under the pressure of my boots. Then my cell phone rang. A co-worker. I watched my step and let the call go to voicemail. Treading with care on the unstable ground, I reached a spot where two grey rocks stuck from the hillside, making a chair. The last few steps made me feel the mid-day heat more than the previous two miles. I took the pack from my back and squeezed my hips into the one-foot-wide “chair,” caught my breath, and sat to admire the Palm Desert expanse, snow-capped San Jacinto Peak, and the jade-green Coachella Valley._

I pulled my lunch out from the outer pocket of my pack. I sat down in the crevice with relief. I sprinkled salt on the fresh red and yellow tomato and sunk my jaws in. The peanut butter on fresh baked bread was next. I licked the excess off the crusts and savored each bite of the sandwich. I took a long sip, nearly emptying the camelback.

A rock tumbled down the cone. My seat was precariously high on a peak under the cerulean sky, across from the white crown of San Jacinto. Ending my reverie, awake to the heat, I stood up and shuffled around, settling the orange pack on my back as pebbles slipped from under my feet. After establishing my balance, I placed each step carefully, feeling for loose rocks under my boots, and threaded my way down the cone to the level plane of short grasses.

Safely off the rocky cone, I walked to the sandy hint of trail that I had taken across the plateau. I followed it through yellowed clumps of grass on a gradual downhill curve, expecting to reach the forest of pines and large boulders below. But after a hundred yards or so, I found myself amidst multiple short paths circling the grass, but I couldn’t see a clear trail weaving through. I scanned the ground for a trail, but found nothing. I needed a marker in the landscape. My throat was itchy; the air had heated up. The sweatband on my hat was damp and dripped on my forehead. I needed to find the shade of the woods and then down and out of Black Rock Canyon, but there were no footprints of any kind, not even my own.

As I searched for prints, I remembered the last circuit I had made to Warren View. My anxiety level increased as I recalled I had followed a bunch of locals all the way, after one had stuck his head out from the water tanks at the beginning of the hike and offered to take me on a route to the local view of Warren Peak. I remembered that hike with the mismatched group of eight, some in shorts and sneakers, others in hiking gear. The recollection brought my eyes to the boulders rising from the yellow grass a few hundred yards away, where they had led me. I hoped to find footprints at their outlook. I crossed the plateau to the circle of rocks where I had sat with that raucous bunch.

Searching the sands in front of the boulders for footprints, I recalled the young military vet in a camouflage jacket yelling, “Hey, you faggots, can’t you find the trail? You guys are locals, right?” I remembered us on vague grass paths, him calling out repeatedly, “No, not over there, that goes nowhere.” Or, “Come on, I don’t want to tell your mamma I left you at Warren View.” With his words echoing in my mind, I searched the rock circle for prints, hoping some locals like those guys had just been there. I would then follow the tracks through the woods to the yellow hills, the dried riverbed, and my car.

There was not a single mark on the dry ground. It was hotter than it had been when I started at noon. I had no more water. I paced back and forth, searching the ground for footprints in a fifty-yard arc between the spot where I lost the trail and the rock circle of the locals. Nothing!

I thought that if I found the “West Trail” sign, it might be a reckoning point. From there, I would retrace my steps to the water bottles in my trunk, and head to the motel, but between the rocky conical hill and inside the row of green firs that lined the edge of the plateau, there was no sign. The sun continued to burn. Grasses, prickly pear cactus, and creosote bushes, nothing else. My mouth itched, and I was now desperate to find my way back.