Leaving California proved a tough slog. It had rained the day we moved in, on March 1, 1997, and driving out we got rain and thunder and lightening going through San Bernadino. That first night we got only as far as Barstow. And not everything got that far. West of San Bernadino the roof rack blew off the car, taking with it JJ’s two guitars, his snowboarding equipment and my luggage

It happened one mile before the Haven St, exit on the 210 West. It appears the clasps just gave way. We had just reached up to make sure it was secure because I thought it was flapping a little loud. It felt solid and steady. I'd checked it at the gas station 10 min. before, and it looked fine there too. But then sproing! We felt again and it was gone.

We got off at the next exit, called 911, and they said they'd dispatch an officer to see what could be retrieved. Then we swung back around and drove back to the previous exit to see what we could see. It seemed we might have a chance because we'd been in the carpool lane and there'd been no one directly behind us. I found the site, even in the dark, more easily than I thought I would. It looked like there was some stuff on the side intact. So I pulled off to wait for the officer.

I concluded there wasn’t much hope for the guitars, and then I saw the canvas guitar bag for the electric being pushed up in front of us by the traffic, a few feet at a time every time something ran over it. It was all trucks and all high speed, and the bag just flapped along every time it got hit. The bag was empty. The electric guitar that had been in it was obviously no more. There was other unidentifable debris floating along as well, maybe mine maybe not.

We waited on the side for about 10 min., which was unnerving in itself. Every time a truck passed in the inside lane the car shook. There was no thought to getting out. Which seemed to be the only thing the dispatcher was concerned about. I called her back, and she explained my timing had been bad. It was shift change, and there wouldn't be an officer available for another twenty minutes. I told her we'd move on. By that time, anything that had been on my roof rack would have been reduced to sand by the trucks.

June pointed out my pair of maroon and gray striped boxer shorts in the road, and then as we were pulling away, I saw, apparently intact in the center lane, my yellow and orange bathing suit moving steadily east with the traffic. Every Father's Day Sarah would buy me a new bathing suit in the loudest colors she could find. She wasn’t home this year, so that one was from two years ago. No way to retrieve it.

We drove another 50 miles or so to Barstow, by which time it was 11 pm, and stopped for the night, feeling pretty low. We hadn't gotten away from the house til almost 8 pm. We'd just wanted to get a few miles from home. I wouldn’t have bothered with the roof rack, but I'd wanted to present JJ with his guitars when we reached Columbia. He'd been so depressed without them.

The rest of the trip got progressively better. How could it not? I bought a new wardrobe in the Barstow Wal-Mart the next morning, a pair of jeans and a blue t-shirt., and we bought a portable aerator for the fish in a local pet shop from a very helpful man.

The fish was dead when we woke up in Flagstaff next morning, floating on his side, motionless, on top of the water. We had turned the aerator off for the night because it was noisy and to give it a rest. That probably wasn’t a good idea, but June brought him back. She has a nice touch. She quick threw him in a small travel tank and turned the aerator on directly in his face. He gradually resumed his swimming, unaware of, or unwilling to talk about, seeing the face of God. That day we went to see cliff dwellings in Walnut Creek AZ, just outside of Flagstaff, where Indians had lived and died 800 years ago.

John and his new clothes posed against the 7,000 ft.-high cliffs of Walnut Canyon whose carved out caves in the canyon wall were home to the Sinagua some 800 years ago. From here they apparently moved to Manhatten.

We didn’t do a lot of other sightseeing, although in Shamrock, TX, we stayed in the same motel Sarah and I had stayed at in January of 2000 when we drove her car to Chicago so she could have it at school. June and I also ate in the same restaurant, too, the Lonestar Roadhouse, arriving, as Sarah and I had done, after closing but they let us in and served us anyway. Very hospitable people, those Texans. This time I bought a souvenir t-shirt. I needed a change of clothes anyway.

For the statistically inclined:

Date	From	To	Mi.	Hrs.
Mon-9/19	Tho. Oaks	Barstow CA	167	3:00
Tue-9/20	Barstow	Flagstaff AZ	358	6.45
Wed-9/21	Flagstaff	Santa Fe NM	394	8:30
Thu-9/22	Santa Fe	Shamrock TX	414	6:45
Fri-9/23	Shamrock	Little Rock AR	509	8:45
Sat-9/24	Little Rock	Anniston AL	491	10:00
Sun-9/25	Anniston	Charleston	438	9:30

John wanted to buy a t-shirt in Winslow that said just that: "Winslow." Cannot be done. They all say, "Standin' on a corner," etc, and feature a photo of the corner in the bargain. Thought of trying the local high school, but the guy at the souvenir shop said he'd been trying to buy a hat from them for two years. No girls or flatbed Fords either. No wonder movies are so expensive.

We stopped at the Clinton Library in Little Rock, just to piss off Mike Radin, but we snapped a picture he’ll like, a display put up by a fellow republican, although one perhaps more in his dotage than even your average republican.

June outside the Clinton Library in Little Rock. Not everyone there was a fan.

Then we crossed the Mississippi river and drove around Memphis a bit. We went by Beale St. (You can’t drive down it; it’s closed to vehicular traffic.) And no, we didn’t follow the ghost of Elvis up to the gates of Graceland, but we saw Sun Records and stopped in at the Gibson Guitar Factory, where prices were way out of my league.

In time, the cat and the dog got to the point where they freely roamed the car -- without once getting under my feet. The dog spent most of his time sleeping in June’s lap, his idea of heaven. The cat’s best moment was sitting on top of the cage during one of those rare spells when Dutch, rather than he, was inside it. (A time out for Dutchie.) He could look down on the dog though the mesh top.

About 80 mi. outside of Birmingham, the highway disappeared and we hit the requisite patch of black, winding, twisting back-country two-lane road in a rainstorm that reminded me my California windshield wipers were overdue for changing. Just outside of Birmingham, I got pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy for failing to dim my high beams fast enough as I approached him. He let me go with a warning. Guess he wanted to look inside a car driving on a dark night on an unlit road in rural Alabama sporting California plates.

We spent that night on the Georgia border as the only guests in a hotel block with a bathroom we had to share with cockroaches. June trapped the biggest one under a styrofoam cup and left him there for the duration of our stay. I had to plug the lamps into the wall sockets before I could turn them on. The lobby was locked, and the desk clerk worked behind a grill. We brought dinner in from an Applebee’s across the street. It was late, and this had been our longest drive of the trip, ending almost as late as our first, star-crossed night out. But we slept okay.

The next day was Sunday. We got an early start and were across the line into Georgia in no time. We got some rain going through Atlanta, but nothing serious and clear skies after that. After a brief stop in Columbia to see JJ, where we did not reveal the truth, we reached the holy city of Charleston around 6:30 that evening, and crossed over the Cooper River into Mt. Pleasant where Sarah and Tracey and the other cat were waiting for us in a hotel that didn’t accept pets.

Tracey had flown to Sarah’s place in Tampa—the original plan had been for her to take both cats but the airline double crossed us and would only take one. Then the following weekend, they drove up to Charleston. They’d moved out of their first motel because their room had cockroaches.

We snuck everyone in our first night and then moved to a more accommodating place across the street the next morning. The petless hotel was lovely, but having Dutch on the fifth floor was no picnic anyway. He had stopped going to the bathroom around New Mexico, but one couldn’t afford to take chances, and actually that meant taking him our more, rather than less, frequently and returning to the room without the usual confidence that the dog would be done for a while.

I told June back in Barstow before the fish died I figured that on a trip like this things ought to balance out eventually. Looking back, I’m left with a certain feeling of accomplishment tinged even with some pleasant memories. But if things were really going to balance out, I think by the time we crossed the Mississippi I should have struck it rich, and that didn’t happen. I’m still waiting, however, trying to be patient.

Click the links below the picture at right for photos from the Wessels' paparazzi event preceding the humvee limo ride to Westlake High School's 2005 night of magic and enchantment.

Ah, house is sure quiet. If you have photos you'd like to add to this lovefest, email me and I'll tell you how.

Enjoy.

This year, everybody in California is talking about the weather; June and I decided to do something about it. The Friday after Easter, we drove out to the desert to look at things in bloom.

This is a very good year for California's deserts. All that rain that's been making people miserable—36 inches in LA since July 4, the second wettest year on record—has turned the desert landscape into a riot of color, relatively speaking.

The fact is, the desert is still basically brown, as June rightly points out. But there are a lot more flecks—yellow, purple, white, red, etc.—in it now. Small flecks but millions of them.

Typical annual rainfall here rarely exceeds four inches. More than that fell in January alone this year. Some ecologists are saying this is the best wildflower bloom in 100 years.

With the wildflower bloom, tourism at California's desert-focused national parks is blossoming as well. Death Valley, (3.3 million acres) recorded 14,000 visitors on a recent day at its park headquarters versus the 4,000 that is normal for this time of year. (Summer is not the time to visit Death Valley anyway.) See Los Angles Times, March 31, 2005, Lush With Flowers, Lousy With Tourists

We headed out to Joshua Tree, about 150 miles east of Los Angeles and much closer to home. It's a much smaller park (789,745 acres), but actually it gets more annual visitors than Death Valley—over a million a year, primarilly campers, daytrippers and rockclimbers. Most of the license plates we spotted were from California.

Joshua Tree became a national monument in 1936 and was elevated to national park status in 1994. Two separate ecosystems, whose characteristics are determined primarily by elevation, come together at the park. The higher, moister and slightly cooler Mojave Desert is the special habitat of the Joshua tree.

Below 3,000 feet, the Colorado Desert encompasses the eastern part of the park and features natural gardens of creosote bush, ocotillo, and cholla cactus. And by our reckoning, a far greater abundance of wildflowers, which did not disappoint.

The Cholla (rhymes with "Goya") cactus appears to be covered with soft, silvery bristles, but in fact its spines are tipped with microscopic barbs that drive deep into the skin at the slightest contact.

The eponymous Joshua tree can reach up to forty feet in height, but it has to contend with extreme aridity and rocky soil. It got its name from the Mormons in the 1850s. They saw the craggy branches of the trees as the arms of Joshua leading them to the promised land.

Throughout the park, one encounters great heaps of boulders, pushed up by the Pinto Mountain fault. Their edges have been rounded and smoothed by centuries of flash floods and winds. The western part of the park includes some of the most interesting geologic displays found in California’s deserts.

Large sections of the park look like God's rock quarry. Broad heaps of giant loose rocks tossed haphazardly about—like one assumes Afghanistan looks like, or even parts of Eastern Kentucky after the mountaintop mining operators have moved on.

The area was originally inhabited by the Pinto Indian Culture, followed by the Serrano, the Chemehuevi and the Cahuilla. In the 1800s cattlemen grazed their cattle in ample grass available at the time and built water impoundments.

About 300 gold mines were developed in what is now Joshua Tree National Park—although few were good producers. An exception is the Lost Horse Mine, which produced 10,000 ounces of gold and 16,000 ounces of silver (worth about $5 million today) between 1894 and 1931.

Homesteaders began filing claims in the 1900s. They built cabins, dug wells and planted crops on land where the daytime summer temperature routinely reaches 115⁰F. But they're all gone now, too.

Cool, huh? I'm not sure God wanted anyone to actually live in this state. I think He just wanted them to see it.

In The Princess Bride, Inigo (Mandy Patinkin) says to Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), "You keep using that word [inconceivable]. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Here in Southern California, we're inclined to deflect the many criticisms directed our way by saying, "Yeah, but we got the weather." And it's true enough, but I don't think it means what we think it means.

We are indeed blessed with a norm of cloudless blue skies and agreeable temperatures. This seduces many Californians, who as a general rule are not the most reflective of people, into uttering mindless meteorological banalities. (That and a lack of other defenses.) JJ's baseball coach once offered him that response when JJ said he missed his friends in New Jersey. Offered it in the middle of the El Nino storms of 1998 that were washing away hillsides and roadways.

When Californians talk about the weather, they display a collective amnesia that glosses over some of the roughest patches of weather you will encounter anywhere in the country.

It doesn't get freezing cold and ridiculously snowy (except in the mountains, but that's good for snowboarding right?). What winter does bring is howling winds, called Santa Anas, that blow for days at a time. They start as soon as I put the big red bow on my outside wreath. I then have to retrieve the bow from my neighbor's yard.

The wind also knocks over so many trucks on the highways that they have to close the roads through certain passes until it dies down. A couple of years ago, a tennis player in Simi Valley was killed when the wind blew a tree onto his court.

Unless you live right along the water, say in Santa Monica in a $2 million three-bedroom, summer often means triple digit thermometer readings in an area where, for some reason, even 80o of this baking heat feels like a 100o does in Iowa or Pennsylvania. By early fall, the air is so dry we get raging brush fires (also wind-aided) from the slightest spark.

And when it rains! The song is correct. This area receives just 14 inches a year on average, but it falls over about seven days. Then there are the wetter than average years. Like this one. As of Jan 10, we'd gotten 16 inches of rain since Christmas. The ground can absorb only so much, and then it starts to move. Generally downhill and in a hurry.

The result is something like La Conchita, although that was an extreme result even for this place. In all, ten people lost their lives, and 13 homes were swallowed by a wall of mud when a hillside above the neighborhood collapsed. A mudslide ravaged just about the same spot ten years ago, but people grow attached to an area and are loath to move away.

One good thing, very few flying insects here, including mosquitoes. But more ants than you've ever imagined in your life. And they come into your house at two times: when it's hot and dry and when it's cold and wet. And they get into everything. When they're visiting, no food of any kind can be left out on any counter, no candy in any drawer, not even last year's candy canes wrapped in plastic and stored in a box in the closet. Glasses, plates and silverware have to be washed twice a day. They even like toothpaste. You kill millions at a time and they just keep coming. George Bush really wouldn't like California. Talk about your insurgencies.

But the sun finally came out today, and lo and behold, the mountains out our family room windows are capped with snow. A beautiful sight. A little cold, but it's supposed to warm up by the weekend. Sigh, when it's good, you really can't beat the weather.

Note: Earthquakes are not meteorological events.

Lee took on Grant for the very first time, again, over the weekend, in the Battle of the Wilderness (Day One). It was a reenactment for our viewing pleasure at a nearby farm off Tierra Rejada Road, just below the Reagan Library. It was about four miles up the road from where we live and where we go for corn and tomatoes in the summer.

The original battle raged May 5-7, 1864, not far from Spotsylvania Court House, VA, in a heavy thicket choked with dense underbrush—hence the name. Ours took place in a cornfield ringed, judging by the aroma, with arugula. How California. (Arugula, while it may be grown hereabouts, is hard to come by locally in quantity. Most stores sell it only in those little, plastic, overpriced packets. Tough way to make a salad.)

Reports from the original Battle of the Wilderness had it that what with the brush and trees and the smoke from the all the rifle fire, you couldn't even find the enemy until you were right on top of him. Our view was pretty good from just about anywhere along the perimeter. There were close to a thousand spectators, I would estimate. I don’t know how many participants, probably several hundred.

About 200,000 troops took the field in the original fight, and there were about 20,000 casualties. (Always a mystery to me about Civil War battles: casualties included dead and wounded all lumped together. It’s always seemed to me it would make a great deal of difference whether you were in one group or the other. It would have to me.)

The Union had twice as many losses as the Confederates. Which is basically the way Grant won the war: He had more men to loose and he was willing to lose them if that’s what it took to grind down the opposition.

One story has it that on the night before the battle, Union Gen. Winfield S. Hancock's Second Corps was bivouaced on the site of the Chancellorsville campaign, which had taken place the year before (technically a Confederate victory but where Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded by his own troups—a case of "friendly fire"). Skeletons, uncovered by the winter rains, littered the camping area. An infantryman kicked at one of the skulls, and told his comrades: "This is what you are all coming to, and some of you will start toward it tomorrow."

There were only intermittent losses at our site, carefully staged for dramatic punctuation as it were. In truth, the battle itself wasn’t all that interesting. It went on too long and not much seemed to be happening that made any sense to the spectator. It might have had a different feel if you were in the middle of it, something that could probably be said about any war.

The interesting part of the day was the scene itself and its ambiance. Full camps of tents on each side, with more tents of camp followers as well, although these were selling souvenir wares rather than personal services. Still, the idea remained the same: trying to turn a profit from the moment.

Most compelling were the long lines of soldiers queuing up for the battle. The drilling, the interminably long and apparently pointless waiting, the humorously bad communications and false starts (and many of these guys carried cell phones) called to mind many a story received about military life from friends who’d been soldiers.

The pecking order was something to observe. The participants were into the spirit of this thing all day long. They saluted their betters to a fare-thee-well. And spoke solicitously and at length to their equals. Some of them even affected southern accents. There were clear signs of the virtue of socio-economic advantage. If appearances were anything, it was good to have some money: you got a better uniform—which invariably came with a higher rank. And it certainly paid to have a horse.

At one point, two men in a collection of infantrymen waiting to be moved to the battlefield could be heard talking about the fight that was getting ready to start in Fallujah. The one soldier was saying that the talk about US troops invading hospitals and harming its occupants were unfair and distorted. Who do you think is in those hospitals?” he exclaimed. “Why it’s all terrorists and Al Qaeda!”

Their conversation was cut short when the order came to move out. Then came the best part of the day: watching the lines of foot soldiers, the cavalry riders and the caissons move past the picnic area where June and I were sitting sipping a couple of beers despite the early hour. Very realistic.

For the first time, I understood the importance of drill practice. That was something I never saw the point of. Wasn’t it something just about anyone could do instinctively? It turns out there’s some skill and organization involved in getting several hundred men, not to mention horses and wagons, from point A to point B without having one bunch march up the backs of another. If you don’t say “halt” and the next guy doesn’t say “halt” and the next and the next, all in timely fashion, and if the squads don’t respond in equally timely fashion, why, someone gets trampled and you have a mess on your hands. I saw minor catastrophe narrowly averted more than once this day.

There were a number of caissons led by six-horse teams, one rider astride a horse in each row and not just up there to look good. Those guys worked hard turning their rigs, running their teams wide and then curling back into the turn, just like a tractor-trailer negotiating a narrow intersection—only with six separate engines! You certainly don’t want a set of caissons marching up your backside. Those guys knew how to keep their distance, and in turn everyone else kept their distance from them, fore and aft. The war might be play, but that danger was real, as innocuous as the exercise might appear to the casual onlooker.

Throughout the day, on a stage off to one side of the cornfield, a steady stream of politician impersonators—Sheridan, Lincoln, Lee, Longstreet, Davis—took turns arguing the merits of the war and what it would mean to our future. People paid polite attention for a while and then wandered off. After all, it wasn’t the main event.

But something I heard Lee say struck me. He said, “I never coveted any territory in the North, I wasn’t trying to dictate how anyone should live, I never raised arms against anyone until Virginia was invaded. I was only defending my home.” I couldn’t wish any other outcome to the Civil War than the one eventually achieved, but I’d never thought about it quite that way before.

A recent picture of the real Wilderness

About three-quarters of the way through the battle, June and I decided we’d seen enough of war and began to make our way back through the camps to our car. We went once more through the sales tents to browse a little among at the items on sale, but we left empty-handed.

That night, they were having a buffet supper and dance for combatants on both sides and anyone else who cared to stay, but we were tired and evening was still a long way off. I suggested that maybe they should have tried that during the Civil War, it might have shortened hostilities. June said she was pretty sure they had, but it wasn’t nearly enough.

"A Skirmish in the Wilderness," Winslow Homer