California - Joshua Tree

After all my mentions about how excited we were to stay with The Chief, I'm very sorry to say that the situation has taken a pretty sharp left turn. 

Apparently both sleeping in and television are things that are prohibited in the Chief’s domain and because TJ and I both tend to enjoy these things on a frequent, if not daily basis…we became weird outsiders in his home.

Normally, we would have just thanked him for letting us crash with him for the night and found somewhere to sleep in the van, however the unrelenting deluge of rain and the desert's propensity for flash flooding left us with little choice but to stick it out and make the best of it. 

I completely understand that we are guests in his home and as couch surfers you have to take your lead from the homeowners as to what is acceptable behaviour, but I just got the distinct impression that we weren't cool enough for him. 

Like, there's no denying that myself, and TJ especially, have a deep appreciation for by-gone eras - we've pretty much been mainlining classic rock, trying to avoid major highways, and opening ourselves up to meeting new people wherever we go. But it seemed like because we weren't getting up at the ass-crack of dawn and chose to ride out the shitty rain storm by marathoning Supernatural, we just weren't his kind of people and he made it pretty clear waking us up at 7am by blaring records right next to our air mattress. 

Fortunately, we had an ace up our sleeve. The summer before The Van Plan, TJ worked in Jasper, Alberta and met a few tourists from the states who, when they heard of her travel plans, told her to look them up if she passed through their respective towns. One such acquaintance was a photographer named Ellie and her husband Craig, and I shit you not, they lived right across the road from The Chief. If only we'd google-mapped their address a day earlier! 

Rain be damned, after finding out Ellie's proximity, TJ ran across the road and knocked on their door and within ten minutes we were firmly planted on their couch with steaming cups of coffee and some of the best conversation we've had so far. 

Joshua Trees outside Craig and Ellies

Their life story could be a movie. Craig grew up in Los Angeles with a father who was a director, and spent his childhood hanging around movie sets with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Edward R. Murrow. By his late teens, he'd fully embraced the surfer lifestyle and spent every afternoon in the ocean cruising the waves. He and some friends visited a travelling circus one day and there is where he met Ellie...she was a plate twirler in the circus! They've been together ever since. 

We gave them a brief rundown of our experiences across the street they immediately said we could pull onto their property and plug the van in for as long as we wanted. The second we did so, our feelings of alienation dissipated and we prepared for our real time in Joshua Tree to begin.

The next day we were invited for a delicious Spaghetti dinner in the house and Ellie offered to take us into the park to the exact spot Gram Parsons was cremated. It saved us huge bucks on gas and provided us with a guided tour of the park on a cloudless and perfect day.

The Joshua Tree National Park looks like a landscape lost in time. I easily imagined dinosaurs roaming the planes, crushing Joshua Trees in their wake, and dwarfing the oddly rounded granite rock piles that litter the basin. Snow capped the circle of higher mountains surrounding the valley and it was an odd sight to see both desert and snow in one environment. 

The one place we've been talking about since we started the trip, was the spot where Paul Kaufman cremated the body of Gram Parsons from the Flying Burrito Brothers at Cap Rock. Ellie of course knew all about it and so it was our second stop (after the vista from the video above).

I had imagined an out of the way, secluded spot that we might possibly have to hike a bit to get to, but like so many monuments in America, the site had bathrooms, a parking lot, and picnic tables surrounding the area. The rock itself did have a weird little hat on top (hence the name Cap Rock) and was still pretty neat to see. 

We walked around the pile of rocks to a spot where the granite had cleaved and there was an odd overhang. Graffiti decorated the rocks with things like “RIP GP” “Cowboy Angel”, “’78” and “I *heart* Gram”, and bits of petrified charcoal (from the cremation, or more likely tribute bonfires from years past) spattered the sand beneath the overhang.

Graffiti at Cap Rock. RIP Gram Parsons.

Ellie then wanted to take us to her favourite place in the park, Jumbo Rocks, and we took some of our favourite photos from the trip so far. Joshua Tree is just such an interesting place! Everything just looks a little bit fake, or like it has no place in the grand juxtaposition of everything else around it. In lieu of describing it further, I'll just post a few of the pictures I took.