Go west, young arantxa!

Highway 46, heading west on the Antelope Plain.

I just got back last week from a very quick (very truncated, I had to rush back a day early to beat the storm) visit down to Los Angeles. Back in December, I learned that my wonderful friend Paula would be in LA from NYC for the President's Day weekend, and that my parents were planning a trip to visit my sister in Seattle for that weekend as well and were looking for someone to take care of their dog, Rusty. What an excellent coincidence! I signed on to drive down to dogsit and see Paula,* too.

In the end, my parents never booked that trip, and I waited to leave Santa Cruz until late Saturday morning. I always take the 101 all the way down (I know every California Highway Patrol hiding spot from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles. 101 all the way!), but traffic was so bad that, in a moment of desperation, I slipped onto the 46 in Paso Robles and jogged over to the 5 in order to catch Paula's party later that evening.

What a weird and wonderful decision that was.

Oil pumps and tumbleweeds along the 46. 

There are certain towns and strips of highway -- even entire counties -- in California that, since we were little kids, my mom would make us lock the car doors in while passing through while on road trips. It makes us laugh now, but my mom was reacting directly to an entire catalogue of highly publicized cases of child molestation (Kern County), kidnappings and serial murders (Merced, Modesto, San Bernardino and Riverside Counties), endemic drug addiction and its correlating violences (Antelope Valley, Inland Empire et al), and general "sordidness" and infamy that has stereotyped so many rural and desert communities in the state.

I like to think of myself as a self-assured and independent person,* and I have plenty of experience travelling internationally on my own, but there are still certain carefully stipulated rules that I follow when it comes to lone, long driving trips: fully charged cell phone, large bottle of water, gas stops in large towns, no highway rest stops, no gratuitous side trips, no scenic drives. And, lastly, no Interstate 5. On the road, I am Little Red Riding Hood and I stay the course -- until this past trip, that is.

Driving the 5 itself, once I got to it, was tedious, boring, long, and filled with insane people tearing down the highway at 90+ miles per hour, but it was the jog along Highway 46 that put me on red alert. As my Yiya would say: METE MIEDO. Specifically, Lost Hills mete miedo.

The small drilling town of Lost Hills is, of course, scary in that same way that the wolf is scary in the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale: sinisterly attractive in the way the Uncanny always is, dangerous and seductive and ugly. The landscape is monstrous in its very nature: arid, barren, corrosive and corroded in its hyper-industrialized mechanizations. Driving through its oil fields, I thought to myself: this is like a weird and horrible Steinbeck novel that I've never read. Then I realized: No, it's Upton Sinclair's Oil! personified, 90 years evolved. Post-industrial and post-apocalyptic. Have you seen the great and horrible There Will Be Blood? It is brutal and beautiful and it is this place. Amazing.

I couldn't drive fast enough through the high winds and dust and miles of oil pumps, passing the tumbleweed and the gas station and the strange little school district building. I am the perfect abductee victim! A young woman driving a Prius! Mindlessly meandering alone along the high desert plain! I am tasty and delectable serial killer bait! 

But I went back! Over my short weekend stay in Los Angeles, I read a great article by Richard Manning on North Dakota's fracking boom in this month's Harper's Magazine. I kept thinking about the Lost Hills oil field, not one of the largest in California but one of the most productive, and its natural gas reserves; the weird little isolated community struggling along beside it; its scary alone-ness and desert desolation. I decided to retrace my route back up to Santa Cruz and stop in Lost Hills and take some photographs.

Here they are. Aren't they something?

I originally intended to pull over along the highway a couple of times while driving through town and the oil fields. But, frankly, I'm still my mother's daughter, and I lost my nerve. The winds were gusting and I felt too exposed. I snapped photos blindly with my iPod as I drove along, eventually putting the camera away when I had to quickly swerve out of the way of the third tumbleweed to bulldoze out onto the highway.

While driving, I started listening to an audio book I had downloaded at my parents' house before leaving: Hampton Sides' 2007 text Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West. It's right in line with another history of the American West I had downloaded a couple of years ago -- Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe of American History (MOUTHFUL) by S.C. Gwynne (2011) -- only, frankly, better. Because I'm a snob, I attribute it to the fact that, though both authors have History BAs from prestigious Ivy Leagues, Sides considers himself a historian whereas Gwynne identifies, professionally, as a journalist. When the rhetoric got problematic and weird in Gwynne's history of the Comanche,*** I first let it pass because he wasn't an academic and then eventually stopped reading/listening altogether. Nearing the end of Book I of Sides' text, I have yet to run into this problem of what I feel to be an unbalanced critical approach.

But I digress: listening to this history of the American Mountain Man, the Mexican-American War, the invasion and conquest of the American West, and the highly polemical and problematic imagining of race and ethnicity in the Southwest in particular, I drove from Lost Hills all the way into Paso Robles. And as I listened (with great interest, might I add) I reflected on all the other kaleidoscope images that make up my imaginary of the American West: the old Autry westerns of the 40s and 50s, and the spaghetti westerns of the 60s and 70s; novels and short stories by those beloved authors who I tie directly to California and the West like Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, John Steinbeck, Joan Didion; those long and yearly road trips from my childhood, during which we explored every continental state west of the Rockies; forays to roadside tourist traps in the Colorado Desert with my grandfather; Pee-Wee's Big Adventure; the Manson Family; the Donner Party; Neil Young and Tom Russel songs; Cabeza de Vaca wandering the Sonoran Desert.

I love the West in all of its kitsch, its horror, its Good, its Bad, and its Ugly.

I decided to stop for dinner before turning north onto the 101 in Paso Robles, and went off in search of Good Ol' Burger, a nutty looking tourist trap in downtown Paso Robles that my dad and I had stopped in for lunch on a drive up to Santa Cruz nearly twelve years ago. The weird shack was gone, as you can see, but the burgers are still good. They built the new place over ten years ago, apparently.

* Paula is nearly 6 months pregnant -- surprise! I wanted to see her before the little one (who I'll have the pleasure of meeting in July) arrives in June. 

** Okay, let's get real: I meant "woman." Travelling alone is definitely a sexed issue. 

*** Judge-y qualifiers like "primitive," "savage," "uncivilized" -- as well as a bold contention that the Comanche (pre-horse) had, literally, no culture whatsoever -- eventually turned me off completely.