DOWNSIZING

The salesman at Van Nuys Chevy was twenty eight years old, tops, two diamond stud earrings. He grinned too much.

He did it again, as we walked off the back lot into the office.

“You are what you drive,” he reminded me. All those teeth. Then he motioned me in to his felt-lined gray cubicle with the elegance of an intern about to examine my prostate.

A half-hour later and I was a 1992 Chevy Silverado Club Cab pickup. An hour ago I was a 1998 Corvette. The difference in cost between being a Corvette and being a used Silverado Club Cab? Twelve thousand dollars. I folded the check and put it in my pocket.

Maybe, not so much like a prostate examination. More like a sex-change. With a rebate.

I love LA.

UNFINISHED

We don’t really know what to do with deserts. They just sit there, and we drive by them or fly over them or drop bombs on them. We feel a little uncomfortable, out of place in the heat and the desolation. They're lonely and unforgiving.

Three big deserts, huge geological works in-progress, spread out east of Los Angeles all the way to Utah, New Mexico and Colorado, and extend south deep into Mexico.

For certain climactic and esthetic reasons, Southern Californians mostly live on the coast, in Los Angeles and the beach towns, San Diego, Santa Barbara. I like the ocean. I like beach towns. I like sand-in-the-bikini kinds of days where you watch girls spreading tanning oil over smooth brown skin and all of that clandestine eroticism that takes place at the shore.

I get away to the middle of nothing, though, escape into desert, where pavement falls apart a mile or two from the interstate and you’re on your own, hoping you’ve brought along enough water and maybe food and a blanket or bag to crawl into if you get stuck with a flat tire or you bog down on a trail, get stuck in the sand. I stop the Jeep in the middle of a dusty road and turn off the engine to hear how hard the wind blows and to catch up on the calls of the ravens and the buzz of crickets and the hum of desert survival and the creatures who work this land for a living.

The burned out Joshua Trees and creosote turned crisp in a fire blackens rusty land and etches an outline against evening sky. Breeze crawls up the back of my neck, a puff of sound against my sleeve and the rush of a kestrel flying low along the brush. Jackrabbits stand at every corner, tall ears and long legs, scrambling for cover as I drive by. Lizards take to the rocks for shade and cool air, taking no time to cross the road in straight lines. Nobody is up here but me. No vehicles, no campers, no one hiking or driving or settled in with tents or shelters. It is barren, rough, untouched, pure. It’s mine.

I’ll see no one for close to two hours, no person, just a few houses a half-mile off the road, a few cows grazing, one that scrambles over some loose barbed wire she knows how to negotiate.

Get gas in Ludlow, the girl at the Mojave Preserve office in Barstow advised. Stay away from Essex, she said, you’ll pay $5.59. Wild Horse Canyon is beautiful, she says, changing colors and decent roads, some sandy spots but the Jeep will handle it fine. I get to Hole in The Wall an hour and a half later, a campground and visitor center compound with an equestrian camp. The Ranger’s Tahoe is parked at the visitor center but it’s closed and no one comes out to greet me. It’s after four-thirty, the sun’s dropping in the west, still enough light for a cruise up to the Mid Hills camp and around back the long way to Essex.

Two hundred yards back down the road Wild Horse Canyon road turns up into a dirt trail that crosses a couple of cow catchers painted turquoise and a small enclave with a windmill spinning in the breeze. A raven flushes on my left and flies low through a hollow for a while, guiding me up the grade until he finishes his duty, pulls up into a perch and I continue past the wash and up towards the crest. Burnt brush, sage and creosote and Joshua have a crust of fire and the survival instinct of something that has been through worse. A daily battle with harsh elements of extreme heat and thirst and dry wind will fossilize some, and who will hold them one day? Say here, there was a tree, a bush, some pre-historic remnant that one day was prescient on this vast plain? Who will come, look back on where I was today, alone on this empty plateau, wandering like some newborn thing searching the desert for a new way to see? And what did I see?

I saw the earth, unfinished, raw, empty.

The breeze kicked up and the sun slanted in against piles of granite and fine grain of sand. The dry air, drawn in across the scrapings of geologic time. I saw the earth, working itself, becoming. And full of life.

JOHN WOODEN

Larry Jones saved me. I was scrolling e-mails and punching up conference calls in another desperate day of tactical corporate survival, until Larry called. John Wooden was in the studio.

'John Wooden? I'll be right down.'

Connie Martinson had just finished up interviewing John Wooden for her show 'Connie Martinson Talks Books' and the Wizard of Westwood was sitting alone on the set. The legendary UCLA basketball coach's book on leadership was hitting stores and the coach was on the talk circuit. Mr. Wooden shook my hand with his strong, soft grip, stared me in the eye with that steady, hawk-like gaze. He looked like my grandfather.

I told him I'd seen some of his championship teams play up in Berkeley. In high school we'd gone up to Cal and bought scalped tickets in the top row of Harmon Gym and watched the Bruins play in front of a rowdy Berkeley crowd.

Mr. Wooden was so nice and polite to me, saying he hoped that I'd enjoyed the games.

I remember the Bruins in their light blue warm-up jackets and white pants coming out and taking the court. The old expression for a basketball team coming out for the game was 'the team took the court.' It meant simply that the starting five went out for the opening tip. Not for the Bruins. They came out early, and literally, took the court, as in took it away from the other team with their opening passing drills.

Lew Alcindor, Lynn Shackleford, Mike Warren and the rest of that team ran a four corners passing drill to start out, with three or four balls, two or three players moving to the center of the half court, pulling in passes, pivoting and firing passes to the other corner, the balls never touching the ground. Crisp, precision, like James Brown coming out on stage and working through dance moves in front of the rhythm section before ever handling the microphone. Just teasing the crowd. They'd break the passing drill with a mock 'dunk' drill with the players just dropping the ball into the hoop, the slam being outlawed when Alcindor arrived in college.

They took the court.

Mr. Wooden was lingering in the studio, in no hurry, so I asked him if I could ask him a couple of basketball questions.

'Sure,' he said, 'go ahead.'

'I've been wondering,' I said, 'in college basketball these days, why no teams use the full court press as their base defense.' The press was the Bruins trademark, a zone press when they made a basket or free throw, turning the tempo up and forcing a fast paced game that favored the quick, tireless Bruins. No one plays defense like that anymore.

'Well', Mr. Wooden said, 'I can't speak for other coaches today, but I can tell you why it took us a long time to get where we could do it.'

I thought I knew the answer. I asked, like a student in the back row, 'because you didn't have the players'?

'Right,' and his eyes twinkled, those killer eyes that have charmed interviewers and players and opponents for decades with that ruthless fundamental approach to the game of basketball. His Bruins made it look simple. Brutal, attacking full court defense, beautiful positioning both on offense and defense and a fast break that preyed upon opponents that tired under relentless pressure.

'We didn't have the players for a long time to be able to play that way,' he continued.

For a starting five to play every night with a pressing full court zone after every basket requires absolute discipline and superior conditioning. Did he mean that he didn't think today's players were up to it?

The eyes sparkled, and he shrugged. 'I can only tell you how we got to develop it,' he said.

So, I gathered, either he didn't think today's players were up to it or the coaches lacked the will to impose a zone press. That was my take, but he wouldn't elaborate.

But I know what I saw in those games up at Cal. Even late in the second half with the game on the line and the crowd screaming, sensing an upset, the Bruins held their poise and made every big play, every defensive stop that they needed to, never leaving their positions and using relentless pressure to force mistakes and turnovers. That comes from daily practice, gym time under a coach who demands all out effort and dedication to detail. Hour after hour of passing drills, fast breaks and outlet passes, stifling defensive pressure without committing fouls. Mr. Wooden didn't use a lot of substitutes to rest his stars. He worked them.

Listen to players like Bill Walton and Kareem talk about 'Coach' like he's a supreme being. He is. He didn't know any more about the game than Bobby Knight or Dean Smith. But he knew how to get more out of his players by demanding that they play a certain way, a way where no one else could keep up with them. That was his genius.

Everyone at the top college level has great athletes. It's the coach who has the guts to turn them into predators on the court, and who can get players to play that hard that dominates. The Bruins overpowered teams before they even got on the court. In the animal kingdom a creature knows when he's dominated by a predator, and submits.

John Wooden was a power coach who walked the sideline in a blazer holding a rolled up program as a foil. Now, Mr. Wooden has the kindly air, the friendly smile and the dimples that crinkle his cheeks. But he still has those piercing hawk-like eyes.

KELSO

Trains don’t stop at Kelso anymore. The freight trains still roll by the old Kelso Depot everyday, but the railroad stopped using the Depot over twenty years ago.

A red tile roof leans out from the second floor, with gentle Moorish arches framing the dusty oasis and palm trees standing in the green grass and sand and hardscrabble. The Depot is the visitor’s center for the Mojave National Preserve now, the sprawling desert outpost north of Interstate 40 and Amboy, and east of Baker, stretching out to Nevada. The Preserve is big and lonesome, the town of Kelso almost dried up in the sun, like most things in the desert without purpose. The Kelso Depot is open everyday for visitors.

I ran over a snake wiggling across the road south of the Kelso Dunes. It was the only living thing I’d seen up close in a half hour. There was no avoiding him. Swerve and maybe roll the Jeep, at fifty miles per hour. So with a little blip, he was done, and I was speeding on towards the Dunes, six hundred foot high wind-blown hills of sand that look like big piles of gold dust in afternoon sun. A few miles back I’d passed the cinder cones, and down further below I-40, the Amboy Crater. These are big, black, volcanic cones that poke up out of the ground from eruptions that started between 7 and 8 million years ago and continued as recently as 10,000 years ago when the Ice Age came to a close.

Inside the Kelso Depot the park ranger greets you.
‘Hello. Passing through?’

‘Yeah, stretching my legs,’ I say. She nods. She’s used to visitors plodding around, not really seeing anything, stopping in, halfway between nowhere and someplace. I was no different.

It’s cool inside the Depot. The old lunch counter forms three sides of a square in the middle of the tall main room, maps and brochures spread out on the dark wood. The hard plastic laminated maps start with a small one of the Mojave Preserve, detailing the roads and trails and open space of the immediate area.

In the lower forty-eight, the Mojave Preserve is the third largest piece of land that the National Park Service manages. A larger map shows Southern California. The Mojave and Colorado (Sonora) and the Great Basin deserts join up southeast of the Mojave, down in Joshua Tree National Park. In Joshua, the three desert climactic zones are all on display, the high desert, the lower desert and the Basin that runs all the way out to Utah. Another map shows the entire United States.

Deserts cover much of the Southwest. They get rain and even some snow. But by definition, deserts give up more moisture from evaporation than they take in through precipitation.

The counter has chairs, bolted down, wooden ones that swivel on a base. They surround the counter in simple formation, with plenty of room in between. It would have been nice to stop in during a train ride, while the steam engine or the coal engine gets fired up with fuel, watered down. Take a seat at the counter and order a tall chocolate milk shake, talk with the waitress about the temperatures that get up over a hundred degrees four months out of the year.

In the West, historic structures stand alone, abandoned by time and money, no longer useful except as memories. The old buildings are allowed to hang around, no threat to modern development. In this new century, we look to the recent past, declare styles to be post-modern, mid-century, left-over structures that take on nostalgia with a bow. The lucky ones live on, guide books and preservation societies reciting pedigree, recalling their history.

A train rolls by today, not stopping. Oh, once it did, though, taking on water and fuel and food, people getting off, getting on. Mailing a postcard, a letter. 'The West,' they'd say, 'It’s vast."

They did once. They did.

LOOKING TO LAND

I opened the sun roof and watched a helicopter hovering over the Strip, looking for a landing zone in a battle of light. It veered, slowed, floated down onto the top of the Mirage. Somebody in the jungle had said that choppers were The Angels of Death, but I said it was too close to call. More like schizophrenia, the mechanical equivalent of a decidedly split personality. Inside one, you were either having a great time, flying the Grand Canyon or Denali or some great wonder of the world, or you were seriously fucked up, plucked out of some hell hole, broken and split up and desperate. Dropping into the gambling Mecca for the time of your life, or the jaws of life were popping your car like a can and packing you off to trauma care. Somewhere nearby, your soul was making decisions. Live or die, win or lose, hold or stay. I drove on, the sunroof open, neon reflecting on the metal top framing my head.

FOUR WHEEL DRIVE

Shit, gimme a new passport. I might be needing it. Got me a Four Wheel Drive.

The Jeep runs great, it ran great, I’m hoping it will always run great. A few weeks ago the little idiot light came on and now they don’t just blink red at you, they spell out more specifically what might be wrong. ‘Service 4WD System’ sounded ominous. It was. The first Jeep shop I went to spent almost a full day to figure out what it needed. Took a couple of phone calls from me to the service writer who’s voice mail promised that he returns all voice messages promptly. He doesn’t. Turns out the next day when I finally had him paged after getting his VM three or four times, he doesn’t exactly return messages that quickly. Didn’t even pick up voice messages, on this day. Turns out he didn’t know what was wrong with my car, on this day, because the mechanic was on lunch and there was no way he’d find out until the mechanic got back, now was there? So he doesn’t return voice messages and has no way to get the mechanic to tell him what’s wrong with my 4WD system. When he does find out, it’s almost two thousand dollars of work. A new transfer case.

When I picked up the car he says, oh, I got your voice message. It was almost three o’clock. I said what do I owe you? Nothing he said. Didn’t think so. I’ll get a second opinion.

Back at the dealer where I bought the Cherokee Laredo, used, with a 75K mile warranty, it took them about twelve hours to tell me the same thing. Transfer case. But they knocked six hundred off the price when I whined. See, I bought this 75K mile warranty, I reminded them. And then just a week after I started getting those so friendly phone reminders from the peppy automated male voice that I COULD renew the warranty, and now of course was the perfect time to do so, the IDIOT light comes on for me, the IDIOT. Because I didn’t renew the warranty? Maybe? Maybe the light going on coincides with a big database that begins calling customers who don’t renew warranties. Is it possible the whole thing is connected in some auto-manufacturer conglomerate Daimler-Benz-Chrysler-Jeep software, programmed to punch up idiot lights, make reminder calls and zap you with fifteen hundred dollar repairs if you don’t ante up?

So how much 4WD’ing do I do, to justify this kind of maintenance headache? Not that much. But it’s a cool ride, a stripped down, silver painted, charcoal interior urban cruiser, and I can ride out any earthquakes, floods, fires and other catastrophes in comfort and safety thanks to that ‘Trail Rated’ badge on the side. Says I can pretty much go anywhere I damn well want to.

Meanwhile I get the 4WD Hardware parts catalog I emailed for, a four color thirty page goody list of Dick Cepek and Mickey Thompson custom wheels, huge Goodrich tires and Super Swampers with tread the size of beer cans. Maybe I’ll just order some new floor mats. And that camo travel mug. That roof rack looks good, the one where I can stuff a mattress, a small television and a surfboard for those extended beach excursions. Gonna need a winch too, when I’m stuck down in the Grand Canyon and that bull elk is charging and I have to pull it all up along the wall and bivouac the whole damn thing from a tree. Some extra strength tensile steel cable, make sure we don’t plunge down into the whitewater, submerge some poor raft trip floaters and get all that grey hair wet and rinse away the hair coloring. Hey, do those Super Swamper tires double as float pontoons? No? Just carry spares, on top of the mattress stuffed into the custom roof rack and the whole thing will float down the Colorado, come out into Mexico somewhere under the border bridge? Got it. I’m there. One more thing? That steering column extension thing, the one that takes the steering wheel right up onto that roof-rack mattress with the television and the Super Swampers stacked up into a nice seat, can I get some pedal extensions too? Ride up there on the Super Swampers, steering and yee-hawwing up there high enough to ward off the critters and banditos and border patrol agents?

Shit, I better get my passport replaced. Lost it in a whorehouse in Tijuana a couple of years ago. Lost it with enough cash in my pockets to start a damn shrine down there.

Probably some maid found it the next morning, or that whore, saying Holy Mother Mary, it’s a miracle, it's a sign. Something like that.

FINAL DAY

Jared Incinelli stood alone in the bullpen, taking his last look at the Quakes who would go on to beat Lancaster 3-2 on Sunday. Late afternoon sun was slanting in over blue and black and gold flags flapping above the left field stands. Incinelli’s arms were folded.

He never threw a pitch today. He walked off the field and into the dugout for the last time, his final day this year. He would go home to tend to family affairs, retiring from baseball, for a while anyway.

I stuck my hand out, said good luck, touching fists. Thanks, he said, I appreciate it.

Not that he wasn’t good enough. He wasn't released. But the grind and the time away from family can pull a ballplayer away too soon, before there’s time to reap the rewards of rich salaries, bonus’ and endorsements.

Incinelli watched his team, storing up memories, feeling the breeze in his face for the final time. It’s not easy letting go of a dream.

He was standing by himself, yesterday. Today, he’s with people who need him too. Another team, the one he’ll always be a part of. They need him now. He’ll throw and he’ll catch and keep the glove soft and oiled, keep the ball near the television set to finger and flip and roll around in his hand as he watches, remembers, keeps the dream alive. To teach his new child what it was like.

In the sun, under the lights, with a shot at the show.

It’s okay, Jared, it’s good to have dreams. They never die.