SIDEHIKE.NET ROAD TRIP 2008

So. Where were we?

Ah yes. Tombstone. Land of the Last-Resort Circle K.

Bo and I woke up Wednesday morning and decided to check out the OK Corral gunfight show, because damned if we were going to let our most lasting impression of the town be the teenage taquito-flinger from the night before. We packed up and headed out to our car, passing the huge maroon tour bus that had transported a contingent of the German Air Force to our hotel. Did we forget to mention the German Air Force? Apparently they were doing some sort of training exercise at the nearby air base, but their presence did cause me to note several things: 1) my high school and college German classes were woefully ineffective and 2) not a one of them were wearing those cool spiked metal helmets. Disappointing.

We showed up in downtown Tombstone, which is to say the part of Tombstone that isn’t a hotel, a little before noon, figuring the gunfight show would be at high noon, like any sensible gunfight show should be. Sadly, it wasn’t happening till two o’clock, and with all due respect to the good citizens of Tombstone, there’s no way we were hanging around that long.

Bo has some great shots from the town over on the flickr page, but they may not convey the full atmosphere of the place, which is this: imagine if the cheesy gunfight show at Six Flags were to grow like a cancer and envelop several blocks of real estate in the midst of otherwise unremarkable desert. The historic buildings are undercut by occasional bits of anachronism such as signs warning away any potential rollerbladers stupid enough to attempt rollerblading on gravel roads and wooden-plank walkways. Costumed re-enactors assail passersby every three feet, trying to talk you out of your money and into whichever wild west show they happen to be shilling for. After walking the length of main street, we’d had enough, and we headed out.

Most of Wednesday was spent in the car, traveling through Arizona and on into Cali along the border. The most notable moment aside from the many, many police officers was our late lunch at In-N-Out Burger, which was really only memorable because it was the closest we’d gotten to real food since the glorious Monday-night pizza. The highway blazed a path through rolling sand dunes around sundown, which made for some scenic farfegnugen, but as the sun began dropping closer to the horizon, Bo began to suspect that our goal of reaching the Salton Sea in time to photograph its alien landscape might not be realized. Sure enough, we didn’t reach the Sea until well after dark, so Bo’s valiant photographic efforts were hampered by the fact that the surroundings looked like a dark blur with a shiny blur in the middle. Nor was there any sign of Val Kilmer.

We finally arrived at our Burbank Holiday Inn around 10:30, and were pleasantly surprised when the staff upgraded us to a suite in the “executive tower.” The surprise was slightly less pleasant when we noticed that our spacious suite sported only one bed, but I didn’t mind taking the fold-out couch-bed, so we didn’t make an issue of it. My good friend Den came over bearing booze, allowing him and Bo to confirm each other’s long-disputed existences, and much fun was had.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday saw the arrival of my lovely wife Mere via plane, our nights occupied by Jason Davis’ rehearsal dinner and wedding, and general hanging about with LA friends. Some highlights:

- Jason’s mom almost murdered a hunchbacked piano player at the rehearsal dinner restaurant, right around the time his neverending set moved into a cover of the Peanuts theme song.

- Bo nearly lost his camera over the side of the Queen Mary when they sounded the foghorn unexpectedly as he leaned out over the railing to get a shot.

- Bo got a room located as far forward into the bow of the ship as you could get and not be on deck. The entire room was on a steep grade, and may in fact have been designed by the same people responsible for the defunct Six Flags exhibit “Casa Magnetica.”

- Jason saw a ghost in his honeymoon suite. Surprisingly, it wasn’t just his own pale reflection in the mirror.

- Jason staged a dramatic monologue recounting of The Ballad of The Kennedale White Trash Wedding on the deck of the Queen Mary. It’s a woeful tale of rednecks, genital warts, and women named Mike, but I could never do it justice. But if you ever meet Jason, be sure to ask him to tell the story.

- Den, Mere and I met this guy in a Studio City Starbucks. He was wearing a ball cap with a name tag attached, reading “A. Nobody C.I.A.” When first noticed, he was dictating loudly into a handheld recorder, delivering a monologue to whatever audience he imagines in his strange, fevered brain, and concluding with the line, “If anyone talks bad about my networks, I will sue them for one billion dollars!” A few minutes later when Den was trying to take a picture of Mere, Mr. Nobody interrupted and said, “Take a picture of this!” He then unfolded a five-foot-wide banner version of his business card. Clearly, his many, many networks spare no expense when it comes to promotion. He interacted with us several more times before we left, most notably when he offered to promote any of our future movie projects on his many, many networks. Did we mention he has many, many networks?

- We saw Beverly Hills 90210’s Ian Ziering in Mexicali on Ventura. He looks more or less exactly the same as he did in the mid-90s, except slightly less employed. Seriously, we couldn’t get Brian Austen Green? At least then we could have asked him what it’s like to sleep with Megan Fox…

That’s all for now. This afternoon Mere boards a plane for home and Bo and I hit the road bound for Vegas. Stay tuned…

As day one of our foray westward winds down, I’m typing these words from the lobby of the historic Hotel Paisano in Marfa, Texas. Some things Marfa’s known for, even if you don’t know Marfa:

- According to IMDb, movies including Giant, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood have all shot here. We haven’t spotted Daniel Day Lewis hanging around town yet, but…hey! Who the hell drank my milkshake?

- Marfa is the setting for Michael Chiappetta’s novel Journey into Darkness. No, I haven’t heard of him or the novel either, but I needed another bullet point to flush out this list, and that’s the best wikipedia could come up with.

- The so-called “Marfa mystery lights” are visible from outside of town (more on that in a minute)

- A small, humble-looking restaurant named “Pizza Foundation” serves what may in fact be the best pizza I have ever consumed. Possibly even the best pizza ever made. Rumors here around town suggest that the pizza actually falls from the sky at dawn every morning, after which it is gathered by a consecrated priesthood of illegal day workers and stored on the alabaster thighs of vestal virgins until ready to be served.

It started out as an absolutely perfect day to hit the road, with weather back home mostly clear, cool, and beautiful. Problems of exploding water heaters and mystery omen pups aside, the day was bright and full of promise.

By the time we stopped for lunch at an anonymous roadside picnic area, a fell wind had begun to blow. I call it that, because it was very strong, and I almost fell over. But honestly, this was the sort of wind that is usually accompanied by a low-man-on-the-totem-pole TV reporter and footage of flattened mobile homes. Or at least a cutaway to that cow from Twister. This wind, I shit you not, dried our sandwich bread from pleasantly fresh to crunchy as we ate. It was actually pretty impressive. Two other things of note from the lunch stop:

- Apparently Uncle Jesse is alive and well and driving a motor home across the country in his golden years. (No, you idiot, this Uncle Jesse, not that one.)

- It’s illegal to get an erection at Texas roadside picnic stops. Seriously, they have signs that say they can charge you fines between $1 and $200. You can’t have an erection and you can’t pitch a tent. But you can sport wood. After you’ve gathered it. For your campfire. Why are you looking at me like that?

As we headed further into the flat, brown, petrol-stink wasteland that is west Texas, the wind was kicking up dust storms so thick that the view through the front windshield looked like we’d wandered into Stephen King’s The Mist if it had been filmed with the color palate of O Brother Where Art Thou. We spent the better part of the day driving through my home state’s dandruff, which was just as well, because it obscured our view of the scenery, of which there wasn’t any. Thankfully once we got nearer Marfa, the dust began to clear, the terrain began to roll, the sun began to set, and Bo began to dangle himself out the window at 95 miles per hour so he could get shots like this one.

Finally, we rolled into town around 7:30 or so, checked in, and walked down the street for a few slices of God’s Only Beloved Pizza. With full bellies and surging cholesterol, we loaded up Bo’s camera equipment and set out to get our Mulder and Scully on (I’m not saying which of us is which, but Bo does look very fetching in a pantsuit) by investigating the Marfa Lights.

First of all: even if the marvelous mysterious Marfa lights had done a no-show, or had proven to be obviously something mundane such as distant traffic or a family of industrious hillbillies with halogen lights strapped to their low, sloping foreheads, the view directly upward was well worth 20 minutes of ear-blistering cold wind at the official Marfa-light viewing platform off Highway 67. The stars at night are indeed big and bright (clap clap clap clap) deep in the heart of Texas, and it’s easy for an ostensible city dweller to forget just how bloody fantastic the night sky looks once you get away from all the assholes who need lights for selfish bullshit like seeing and reading and performing open-heart surgery. Stars kick ass, is what I’m saying here.

But: Marfa lights, right? What happened? Did we see the mothership? Swamp gas? Ball lightning? Well, I’ll just go ahead and admit that I spent at least two minutes squinting like a jackass at three quite stationary lights in the distance, muttering things like, “I think that one moved to the right a little,” and “Does that one look like it’s flickering more than the others to you?” before deciding that, ah, those were distant building lights, I’ve been looking in the wrong direction, and I’m a stupid asshat.

Which was all the more obvious when I turned 45 degrees to the right and HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THAT! I’ll be durned. I went in skeptical and prepared to be thoroughly unimpressed, but damned if those crazy old Marfa lights didn’t show up right on schedule and put on quite a show. I’m frankly stumped as far as theories, so I’ll just describe what we saw.

Over the course of 20 or so minutes, we saw between 1-3 glowing, apparently spherical lights in the distance out over the desert. Their orientation, movement, and behavior discounts, at least in my thinking, that they were faraway car lights. There was a tall broadcast tower or something similar in the same area of the horizon, marked by three blinking red lights. This is only important because it gave us a stationary object by which to gauge the Marfa lights’ movements. And move they did. They drifted slowly with no apparent pattern, occasionally jerking with sudden, unpredictable hops across the sky that seems to discount aircraft, because unless we really are reverse engineering alien technology (and Indiana Jones wouldn’t lie to us), any plane that tried these maneuvers would come apart like this windmill. The glowing spheres would disappear and reappear, sometimes just blinking out, sometimes appearing to vanish behind a hill, leaving a faint coronal aura like you get when an unseen car’s headlights are approaching you from the other side of a hill. But other times they would dip along that same path and not vanish behind what may or may not have been an unseen hill (it was bloody dark out there, so the horizon was pretty much impossible to make out). They changed color frequently, and sometimes seemed to split into 2-3 smaller spheres before rejoining into one.

And that’s about it. They were still dancing on the horizon when we packed up and headed back to the hotel, and we could see them, now that we knew where to look, pretty much the whole drive back into town. Conclusions? Beats the hell outta me. My theorizing in this regard is about as limited as it was with the UFO Jason and I spotted in the New Mexico desert years ago (on yet another road trip out to LA…hmm…). I don’t have the foggiest what it was. I saw it, it didn’t move like aircraft, and it was unnerving. It, like the Marfa lights, remains a mystery, something inexplicable, or perhaps only explicable to smarter chaps than I. As for me, I like a little mystery in the world.