Encircling my new home of Barstow, CA is desert. Mountainous, dry, and countless shades of brown, the land surrounding this small oasis town is foreboding and barren.
I imagine an aerial view of the surrounding area would be miles of nothing scarred by random highways that don't even have police to monitor them; rather there are only signs that warn that the speed is watched by aircraft, which always makes me laugh as I picture a shaky spotlight hoovering over my Corolla and a loud-speakered voice telling me to pull over to the side of the road in the pitch black of the desert night. I'm sure this is far from reality, but I cannot fathom another way that this would be a feasible system for controlling speed.
All this void surrounds a town filled with thin, long houses fairly stacked on one another. Street after street stuffed with seemingly abandoned cars and out-of-place deep grooves in the road to serve as rain gutters during the ten days out of the year when a few drops fall. These grooves seem to symbolize the spirit of Barstow, which calls itself "The Crossroads of Opportunity" - lofty plans with nothing to fill them.
Back in the heyday of Route 66 Barstow must have been a fabulous tourist spot. Empty store fronts and abandoned diners speak to the era when families rushed out of their station wagons for a quick bite on the way to LA, bikers threw their legs over their Hogs and roared off to Vegas, and couples newly eloped snuggled with each other as they looked over cheesy souvenirs so that they would always have something to remember their elicit trip. Or at least this is how I picture it.
Now the dirty streets mirror the decline in the economy. Many jobless people stew in their sweat as they sit on the side of the road staring at the passing cars because they literally have nothing else to do. Hookers are scattered everywhere, but they are hard to detect in their bland and therefore unusual uniforms. Youth of every race and creed wonder the streets at all hours of day and night in long denim jeans despite the 105 degree summer heat.
A few weeks back my boyfriend and I were sitting in our living room sweating on our couch, wearing the bare minimum of clothing as we saturated our vintage upholstery with dew. Suddenly I saw a man standing by our front window, meaning that he had to be standing in our cactus garden in front of our house. He spoke only Spanish, which neither of us speak. I couldn't understand what he was saying, but my boy eventually heard 'tamales' and figured out that this older Mexican man was trying to sell us food.
We told him no and he moved away, but this moment of entrepreneurship perfectly describes what its like to live in Barstow. While cooking in my own juices in my house I had to turn away someone I didn't understand. And I don't truly understand this kind of living yet. I don't understand abandoned businesses and hostile youths. I don't understand useless grooves in the road that brush the undercarriage of your car every time you drive over them. I don't understand houses with no yards and miles of nothing outside of town.
But I do understand that this is exciting. This lifestyle and this location please me even if it's beyond my current frame of reference. The isolation and the depressed economy is foreign to me, but not to so many others. As trite as it sounds, this barren landscape makes me aware of how lucky I've had it my whole life. If nothing else I appreciate the nothing of this town for that.
However this doesn't answer the question of whether I can survive it. That bit I'll have to figure out soon enough. But I'm tough. Max is tough. And so far we're doing just fine in Barstow.
