Our trip to the desert.

1. First, in order to get to the desert, you have to drive through San Bernadino county, otherwise known as the inland empire! This is where Derek spent his senior year in college living in a house called Twin Palms with a couple of heroin addicts (it took him about a year to realize that part) and being attacked by wild dogs. Anyway, it is shockingly horrible. Subdivision after subdivision - and we make fun of communist architecture? - and a layer of smog so thick you could cut it with a knife. Now, I realize that the smog is also rolling in from other places (like, um, LA), and that we New Yorkers could also have smog if we were cut off from everything else by mountains. But it just paints such a clear, depressing picture of what is happening to the environment. And, I've really never seen anything like this before.

2. Derek taught me that it is fun to drive while listening to music. Let's not go pretending I'm a confident driver, or that I don't spend the first ten minutes of any highway driving hyperventilating and whining: I hate this, why are you making me do this??? However, when that all settles down it is fun to drive through the desert in an easterly direction listening to certain songs (Bri) and pretending that one is in SFU. Yeah.

3. In Joshua Tree, we climbed up on some rocks where you could see the forever landscape of desert, more rocks, mountains, and no signs whatsoever of human habitation, just a few animals coming out at dusk, little desert bunnies and kangaroo rats and chipmunks. We drank red wine straight out the bottle and watched the sky change to pink stripes, then dusky purple and a perfect full moon rising up behind the rocks. We'll be back in the spring, when the Joshua trees begin the flower, and I'm told they carpet the desert in white petals.