Palm Springs is just one of eight towns clustered together on Route 10, ninety miles from Los Angeles. I was attending a conference in Rancho Mirage, and my hotel was in Cathedral City.
Down the road was a casino in the town of Twentynine Palms. It's only 29% as powerful as the town of Onehundred Palms. And both of those can't hold a candle to the town of Thousand Palms. Twentynine Palms does win bragging rights for the stupidest town name in California, though. (New Jersey's stupidest is a tie between Ho-Ho-Kus and Cheesequake.)
West of Palm Springs are 3100 electricity-generating windmills. The near-constant weather makes the winds around here usable 300 days out of the year. It was great to see clean alternative energy in motion, literally. Of course I burned through four tanks of gas with all the driving I did during over my California week, so it was probably hypocritical of me to even look at the windmills.
My hotel was adjacent to a square mile of nothing. Just blank sand with the occasional rock. I was used to vacant lots, bad parts of towns, and other urban sprawl leftovers. But out here was nothing, to the tenth power. To be so far away from as much as a plant (outside of the landscaped golf course) let me know why 'deserted' comes from the word 'desert.'
Desert life has its advantages in February. You didn't need a jacket; the sun was actually uncomfortable to sit in for too long. Meals for Sunday and Monday were eaten outside, even a Sunday night dinner that went well after sundown. Each table had a tablecloth, and at the end of the day, the tablecloths were left on the tables. It rained so infrequently it didn't seem to be a major concern.
Streets in this area are named after vintage celebrities. Bob Hope Drive, Dinah Shore Drive, Gerald Ford Drive. I was afraid that if I made a wrong turn I'd get lost on the corner of Zsa Zsa Gabor and Bob Denver.
All of the streets also had distinct drainage ditches. They were just a dip of an inch or so, but you hit them every time you turned into a parking lot. Soil in the northeast actually absorbs water, so ditches aren't so prominent where I live.
Tuesday morning it started to rain. Breakfast was moved inside. The outside tablecloths got soaked. It continued raining through lunch. Rain went off and on throughout the day.
There was another full day of it scheduled for Wednesday. What was I, a rainmaker? Palm Springs has about two days of rain a year, and I'd be here for both of them. The East Coast was having snowstorms seemingly every week all winter, and I left that only to see its slightly warmer cousin.
The top story on the local news that night was the rain. Reporters pretty much soiled themselves describing how bad it could be. This is their disaster weather, and they freak out like east coasters before a blizzard. People were warned to stay off the roads. A reporter was sent to a supermarket to tape frantic shoppers buying bread, milk and eggs. "Oh my God, a disaster's coming! I need to be able to make French toast!"
I was hoping for a earthquake while I was out here, but flash floods and mudslides would work just as well. I've never been physically hurt by any act of nature, so I am therefore invincible. The worst thing I can emotionally think of happening to me is that my car gets smashed, and I had a rental car! Natural disasters were just theme park rides, and we didn't have this ride in the Eastern Time Zone.
Most of my Wednesday was spent hitting West Coast supermarkets for work. I had the rental car for the week, so I'd jump from motel to motel, hitting whatever new stores and buying whatever new brands I could. I spent most of Wednesday scrambling from my car through showers to supermarkets, where not a single soul was grabbing at the emergency supplies. No one was buying duct tape and plastic tarps, either. Nice to see Americans still have some sense.
I was heading back through L.A. to reach Bakersfield and the central California supermarkets, so I drove past the windmills again. They were all at a stop. A few hours after I left Palm Springs, 4600 electric customers lost power. It wasn't the windmills that did it, but water damage to underground cables. Funny: in Monopoly, putting the electric company and the water works together is a good thing.
The first car accident I saw was by the windmills. It was preceded by half an hour of near stopped traffic. The first two lanes of the four-lane road were blocked off, by what looked to be a 30-foot charred rectangle. It was a Cintas van that had rolled over in the rain. I was looking at the underside. Later on I'd see a few scattered fender benders. The finale was a heavily armored prison bus that had a front tire shredded like taco cheese. Maybe there's so many car crashes in movies because cheap producers just film these roads and write movies around them.
I pulled off Route 10 at Yucaipi (funny name, but still not beating Twentynine Palms) to get some dinner. I went a little ways trying to find something other than fast food. I picked a random road to turn off of, and saw a "FLOODED" sign by a dip in the road. I wondered if it was just a precautionary measure, so I kept on going. Five feet later I stopped. The dip had turned into a riverbed. It was only a foot or two deep, but that was the depth of the water that always sucks away that one guy who dies in these things. A cop car was on the far side of this new river, protecting doofuses who would choose to ignore the sign on that side.
I turned around and headed back to Route 10, but that river I saw had a little sister sharing the road with me. It was a two-lane road, and poor drainage had turned half of the right lane into something between a crick and a creek. No cars were slogging it through the waterbound lane, instead taking up the lane and a half like a husband hogging the whole bed when his wife leaves for a night. I stayed as far right as I could, not wanting to get fully in the left hand lane and be obligated to floor it. Still, once or twice I saw a maniac flooring it in my rear view mirror, and pulled into the deluge rather than risk that guy's brakes not working.
This rain was setting one day records all over California. About three inches had fallen since Tuesday. An inch of rain generally means ten inches of snow, so this is the same amount of water as a two and a half foot blizzard. And keep in mind this desert getting the rain, which reacts to water like a diabetic on a Willy Wonka tour.
Los Angeles traffic was at glacial speed. Sporadic parts of the road were getting flooded, so random parts of the road were shrinking down to one lane. I wanted to switch to a different road, but I was going to Bakersfield that night, and Route 10 to Route 5 was the only way to get there.
Route 5, running north up the whole state, was making Route 10 look like, well, a desert oasis. I was getting radio reports of the Grapevine (Route 5 below Bakersfield) being outright closed due to mudslides. Drivers left their cars on the road, some of them still running, to escape the torrent. The mud was three feet thick in places. This was the southbound Grapevine that was getting buried. Northbound was clear, or at least not advertised as Mudville. I was heading northbound, so I could make it up there, but who knows how I'd make it back. An alternate road south would add hours to my trip.
I humped up a big mountain, my wipers going into their fifth consecutive hour of use. I was driving through absolute darkness. No traffic lights, no houses or restaurants or gas stations in sight. I crested a hill, and saw a twinkling horizon miles and miles away. Bakersfield was down there, an hour away but in plain sight, and there wasn't a light bulb between here and there.
There wasn't a single turn in the road: it was just straight and slightly downhill for the width of New Jersey. On this stretch of road I could fall asleep at the wheel for half an hour and be fine.
I was trying to make it there by 9:00, to see Angel. It was a stupid thing to plan a schedule around a TV show, but even stupider to race down a wet Grapevine at 75 mph to get checked in before 9:00 (I got in my room at 9:04, in time for the opening credits). To my credit, I wasn't trying to break land speed records and make it by 8:00 for Enterprise. And I didn't force a single person to drive into a river to avoid me.
Once in the motel room, I could shake my head at all the irresponsible drivers out in weather like this. Where were they going that was so important to risk driving in that hell? Meanwhile, I ate my store brand cookies and watched my show about vampires.
Bulldozers cleared the mud from the Grapevine quickly; theoretically it's no different than snow removal, only a different color scheme. I came back through the Grapevine on Friday, my trunk sagging with store brands. Enough mud was still on parts of the road you wouldn't want to walk on it in good shoes. You could see the shoulders where the mud washed down, which were now bare of vegetation and a couple feet thinner than they were Tuesday. The scenery up in the mountain is nice, but the Grapevine drive itself is as boring as oatmeal. I didn't miss anything with the night drive.
I flew back to New Jersey on Saturday. I left the manic depressive weather behind, and welcomed the stability of a 6 degree day today, a 6 degree day tomorrow. I was just in time for the biggest snowstorm in a decade.
Two and a half feet of snow dropped in certain parts. That number wasn't just a coincidence: this was the same damn storm I had just been through. It took the slow path traveling across the country, while I took a redeye flight out of San Diego on Saturday. If I had left 24 hours later, my plane probably wouldn't have been able to land.
The local news soiled themselves. Two lane roads had one and a half lanes plowed. People were urged to stay off the roads. A lot of people panicked and bought French toast supplies. But to me, it was just a weather rerun.