Desert Daze – A Southwest Adventure (VI)

Part Six: Troughs, Tables and Technology

It’s getting dark and I must find somewhere to park Hotel Truck to sleep. I spy on the map the remote Stateline Campground just off the road I will hike from the next two days. The enthusiastic women in the BLM office told me that this road (called House Rock Valley Road) is passable by two wheel drive vehicles but, setting out on it, I immediately have my doubts. It’s extremely rutted, some so deep they’re more like troughs, forcing me to drive at a snail’s pace staying high on the dried-out top ridges to avoid scraping the undercarriage. Cringing as I creep forward, I expect at any moment to hear the dreaded screech of metal on rock. I bottom out the van several times and each time I look back fearing the worst – a trail of oil stretching out behind me. It never happens; we survive the drive, Hotel Truck and me, but it’s a loooooong 8 ½ miles.

As I drive into the campground, a little sign informs me I have left Arizona and entered Utah, hence the name, Stateline. It has picnic tables – hooray! My kingdom for a picnic table! I think about just how much that means to me right now - a place to eat, sit, open up a suitcase, and to type in these words. How interesting it is that in today’s gadget-intensive society that something so simple as a place to park my butt could mean so much, miles away from civilization as I am. And that's just the way I like it on these trips, primitive, where the simple is significant; it really helps me connect.

I have the place to myself, as usual; it’s just too darn cold at night for most people to consider camping. I pour myself a glass of fine red wine and wander the campground, basking in the faint glow of last light, admiring the red-rock hills surrounding me while enjoying John Huling’s heavenly ‘Spiritlands’ album on my iPod - this beautiful music has become the soundtrack for this trip.

OK, I admit it - there are two modern gadgets I can’t live without on these adventures any more. The first is the just mentioned iPod – what a great invention. So much music, so portable; for personal listening, it just can’t be beat. The other gadget I always bring along is the similarly named iPaq. By today’s standards, the iPaq is ancient technology (I acquired it in 2002), but it serves my needs wonderfully – it’s a ‘Pocket PC’ that I use to input and store my notes. It and the foldable keyboard I purchased along with it are so small that I can store them in my backpack ready to be whipped out at any time I need to capture some fleeting thought that I surely would forget otherwise. You may ask why I don’t just take a small notebook in which to jot down my notes - if you saw my handwriting you’d understand why. Even I can’t decipher it any more; I’m so used to typing on a keyboard that writing makes me impatient and my handwriting suffers. Badly. Besides, with the iPaq I can easily then transfer my notes to my laptop or home computer to work with them – sure beats typing everything in from hand-written notes!

Next – Like Being On Another Planet